Impact and Knowledge Exchange
Where the research has left the literature: the organisations that adopted it, what changed in how they work, and what independent sources recorded at the time.
Founding Dean of a nonprofit applied research academy in Chongqing, established with district and municipal science-and-technology support and built on research links with KU Leuven and other European institutions.
Institution building
Named as the designated head of the Academy in the district government approval of March 2019, I led its platform-construction period: setting research directions, forming research centres, coordinating academic and enterprise partners, and communicating applied outcomes to non-specialist audiences.
International cooperation
The platform grew out of a science-and-technology cooperation agreement between Chongqing and KU Leuven, and went on to form centre-level agreements with four European universities across three countries — KU Leuven, Ghent University, OsloMet and the Technical University of Munich — each with its own dated, signed instrument. The distinction that mattered in practice is that these were governed by signed agreements rather than informal contacts, which is why the traffic kept running in both directions: researcher mobility each way, four signed tripartite agreements for joint master’s and doctoral supervision, joint publications, and a shared submission to a European national research council.
International governance
From 2021 to 2022 I served as Vice-President of the International Cooperation Innovation Center (ICIC). The point of recording it here is not the title but the vantage: sustained cross-border research work eventually requires someone to sit on the side that sets terms, arbitrates between institutional interests and decides which collaborations are worth formalising, rather than only on the side that delivers under them.
Circular economy
Two of the Academy’s research centres were established on the same day in March 2020 around a single question: whether demolition and excavation waste can re-enter construction as a specified material rather than leaving as spoil. One works on resource-utilisation pathways for construction waste; the other on recycled urban materials and greener alternatives in the built environment. Both were co-founded with a European research institute working on zero-waste construction, and both carried the joint supervision of master’s and doctoral candidates alongside the technical work.
Indicators are taken from the government-accepted construction-period report for the platform, covering 2019 to 2023.
The work is no longer a set of separate projects. It covers a continuous chain, which is what allows a single method to hold across an asset's whole life rather than at one point in it.
Routes by which the methods reached identifiable users in industry and public infrastructure. Corroborating statements from the organisations involved can be provided.
Digital quality assessment
Laser scanning and model-based assessment methods developed in my published research were written into a project inspection procedure for a large commercial development, moving quality checking from sampling by hand to model-referenced evaluation.
Extreme-wind resilience
Principal investigator on commissioned research programmes covering wind-disaster scenario reconstruction, intelligent risk assessment, and emergency-repair decision support for tall slender steel structures exposed to extreme weather.
Structural monitoring
MEMS sensing and BIM-linked monitoring work applied to bridges and public infrastructure, including UAV and sensing-based inspection with model-based interpretation for maintenance planning.
Circular economy in practice
A recycled-materials pilot on an expressway section, drawing on European construction-waste recycling research, turning excavated maintenance waste into reusable material on site.
Capacity building
The platform supported postgraduate and doctoral researchers, hosted international exchange students, and incubated technology ventures in sensing and digital construction, with three companies registered by core team members.
Beneficiary range
Beneficiaries span large infrastructure operators and their research institutes, commercial developers, a large construction group, a provincial transport authority, and a national railway construction group.
Third-party reporting on the research platform and its China-Europe cooperation, 2017-2021.
Xinhua News Agency, August 2019
Reported KU Leuven as the first foreign university to establish a research institute in Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, working on advanced sensing, BIM, intelligent control, structural materials, big data and IoT for urban infrastructure.
District government portal, March 2021
Reported the Academy's applied work on bridge inspection using BIM, UAV and sensing methods, and its recycled-materials pilot, with the author quoted as the Academy's dean.
Not a list of projects, but a demonstrated way of getting research into the places where decisions are actually made.
A repeatable pattern
Each pathway above follows the same shape: a method published in the literature, an identifiable organisation that adopted it, a documented change in how that organisation works, and independent reporting of the result. That sequence is difficult to produce once and harder to produce repeatedly. Where it has been produced, it can be produced again in another jurisdiction.
Research and practice as one activity
The commissioned programmes are not consultancy running alongside the research; they are where the research questions come from and where its answers are tested. Wind-hazard resilience, residual capacity in ageing structures and sensor-informed assessment all originate in problems an asset owner could not resolve, and return to the literature once resolved.