Inês Rosa, a fellow researcher at the Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability (CERIS) – a research centre affiliated with Instituto Superior Técnico – was awarded the fib Achievement Award for Young Engineers 2025 – Research Category.
Every two years, this award is granted by the International Federation for Structural Concrete (fib) to a doctoral thesis by a researcher under the age of 40 whose work makes a significant contribution to the field of structural concrete and its applications.
The award ceremony took place at the fib Symposium 2025, held in Antibes, France, on 16 June, where Inês Rosa was invited to present her research work. Her award application was supported by the Portuguese Group for Structural Concrete (GPBE), a national member of fib.
The award recognised the work carried out in her PhD thesis, titled ‘Fire behaviour of concrete structures reinforced with GFRP bars’, supervised by João Firmo and co-supervised by João Ramôa Correia and Mário Arruda, professors at Técnico. The main aim of the research was to characterise the mechanical behaviour of glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars and their bond to concrete at elevated temperatures, evaluate the fire resistance of concrete slabs reinforced with this type of reinforcement, and propose fire design recommendations for GFRP-reinforced concrete members.
In 2024, the same work received another international prize, the ‘ESCM Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis 2022’, awarded by the European Society for Composite Materials.
