Claudia is Assistant Professor in Resilient Asset Management and Maintenance with the Operation, Planning, Accounting and Control Group (OPAC), Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Science, Eindhoven University of Technology since January 2019. As member of the 4TU-programme DeSIRE, led by the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering, she conducts interdisciplinary research addressing the challenges of managing and maintaining resilient infrastructures.

She holds a BSc in Civil Engineering and a MSc in Transportation Systems and Infrastructures from the University of Palermo, Italy. There, she also worked as research student and teaching assistant in structural dynamics and mechanical characterization of road materials for improved design and maintenance. She was visiting scholar at the Nottingham Transportation Engineering Centre (NTEC), Department of Civil Engineering, University of Nottingham, UK, developing mathematical models to describe the degradation/recovery behavior of pavement materials for design and maintenance purposes. She then pursued her Ph.D. in Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure Asset Management within the Resilience Engineering Research Group (RERG) at The University of Nottingham. In parallel to her Ph.D. she worked as research associate on the EPSRC project “Robust Life Cycle Design and Health Monitoring for Fuel Cell Extended Performance” in collaboration with Loughborough University and Intelligent Energy. After that, her position as research associate was sponsored by Network Rail, and her research focused on railway asset management. Claudia was also local Co-Investigator for The University of Nottingham in the In2Rail EU project (http://www.in2rail.eu) and led the research conducted by the Nottingham unit within WP06-Smart Infrastructure - Maintenance Strategies & Execution. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2018 by defending her thesis “Modelling resilient railway systems”. She is now an associate member of RERG, as well as a member of the ESReDA (European Safety, Reliability & Data Association) project group on Resilience Engineering and Modelling of Networked Infrastructures.

Claudia’s research focuses on designing new methodologies to support the planning, operation and maintenance of safety-critical infrastructures for seamless performance and lower total costs. The wellbeing of modern societies is dependent upon the functioning of infrastructure systems which enable the movement of people, goods and services. While infrastructures are aging, increasingly higher levels of performance are required to satisfy society’s needs. This results in the system being more vulnerable to disruptions, with worst consequences for users as well as stakeholders. Therefore, the need is to manage such systems to prevent, tolerate and respond to failures. To tackle such a need, she conducts multi-disciplinary research at the intersection between reliability engineering, process modelling and operations research. With application to the railway, energy, oil and gas and roads sectors, she develops novel methodologies combining degradation/failure analysis, dependability and system performance modelling, stochastic simulation and mathematical optimization to support asset management decisions. She ultimately aims at developing integrated planning methods embedding diagnostic, predictive and optimization capabilities to support the design, operation and maintenance of resilient infrastructure systems.