Elyas Ghafoori is a Full Professor of Steel, Composite and Lightweight Construction and the Executive Director of the Institute for Steel Construction at the Leibniz University of Hannover (LUH), Germany. He is also Board Director of Test Centre Supporting Structures (TTH) in Hannover, which has large-scale facilities for structural testing.
His main research areas at the LUH are on steel support structures for wind energy (e.g., offshore wind turbines) and robotic construction/manufacturing.
Prior to joining the LUH, he was the leader of “Sustainable Metallic Structures (SUMS)” group at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and at the same time a lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland. His main research activities at Empa were related to new repair materials, models and systems, for examples, fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, shape memory alloys (SMAs) and nonlinear ductile structural adhesives. At ETH Zurich, he was responsible for the course on “Fatigue and Fracture in Materials and Structures”.
Elyas Ghafoori has received his master degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He has then completed his PhD in 2015 in Civil Engineering at ETH Zurich, which was awarded by the ETH-Medal (summa cum laude).