Juan Pablo Aguilar-López

Profile

Juan Pablo is a civil engineer with experience in research and consultancy for hydropower and flood defence related projects. He is interested in the use and implementation of technology (open hardware, innovative sensors and machine learning) in structures design and operation for flood risk management. He currently holds an Msc. in Hydroinformatics and a PhD in probabilistic design of multifunctional flood defences. In the later stage of his career Juan Pablo has also done post-doctoral research on innovative monitoring techniques of flood defences based on fiber optic cables acoustic sensing and in sewer systems Bayesian inference methods based on CCTV visual inspections information.

Research

Since the early start of his career, Juan Pablo has been very much interested in the use of real time monitoring of flood management structures and the post-processing of these measurements via surrogate modeling for structural operation. He aims to improve and develop methods to monitor and quantify flood risk and resilience and to incorporate resilience in designs for flood risk reduction in cities and urban regions, including both grey and green (nature-based) interventions. The combination of real time monitoring and data driven modeling, allows to have a fast and accurate diagnosis of a flood defence system for operation. This is of paramount importance for flood risk managers and stakeholders as it makes flood defence systems more flexible and resilient plus it can also be used for risk reduction, early warning, evacuation decision and even asset management.