Dr. Alex Sixie Cao (currently Postdoc at Empa and ETH Zurich) will join as an Assistant Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore - from July 2026. We are currently recruiting multiple PhD students & Postdocs. NTU CEE ↗
Risk and Infrastructure Systems Lab
Led by Dr. Alex Sixie Cao, our research is dedicated to providing a scientific basis for equitable, robust, and sustainable decision- and policy-making of structure and infrastructure systems for ourselves and future generations.
We integrate structural mechanics, system reliability, and decision-theory – from materials and components to complex networks – to study how structures and infrastructure systems behave, adapt, and fail in a dynamic and uncertain environment in an intergenerational context.
Vision
Our vision is to build a scientific foundation for managing uncertainties from climate change and rare events in structure and infrastructure systems to support engineering decisions that are rational, ethical, and responsible across generations.
Mission
Our mission is to investigate how systems perform under uncertainty and rare events over time and to develop quantitative methods for evaluating their performance and safety. We aim to:
- Advance analytical, numerical, and probabilistic models for structural and system behaviour.
- Quantify robustness, reliability, and interdependencies across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
- Link system-level understanding with design practice and risk-informed decision-making.
- Foster interdisciplinary research and education on structural safety and uncertainty.
What we do
We study how infrastructure should be designed, managed, and adapted in a dynamic and uncertain world. Our work is organized in three research streams:
- Risk acceptance and safety. Balancing safety, sustainability, climate change, demographics, and long-term resource use to support rational infrastructure policies.
- Reliability and robustness. Understanding how structures and systems perform, degrade, and interact over time, including their robustness and ability to withstand damage.
- Risk-informed decision-making. Exploring how stakeholders make choices under uncertainty and how policies can guide robust, adaptive, and responsible long-term outcomes.
Join our team
We are searching for students and collaborators to join our team on reliability, risk acceptance, and risk-informed decision-making.
We have multiple fully funded PhD scholarships available with a starting date in August 2026.