Meet Us

Get to know the people who bring passion and skill to our team every day

Dr. Fahad ul Rehman Abro's journey into civil engineering began far from the walls of any university. Growing up in Hala New, a small town in Sindh Province, Pakistan, he was shaped by a deep sense of community and an early awareness of how infrastructure shapes everyday life. Around 2006, as he considered his career path, he found himself increasingly drawn to the scale and ambition of large construction projects, bridges stretching across rivers, high-rise buildings rising from the ground, entire cities being built from the earth up. It was not merely the spectacle that captivated him, but the underlying question: how are these complex structures conceived, designed, and made to endure?

That curiosity led him to pursue a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Civil Engineering at Quaid-e-Awam University of Engineering and Technology, Nawabshah, Pakistan an institution that grounded him in both technical rigour and engineering purpose. Seeking to deepen his expertise, he went on to earn his PhD in Structural Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, one of Asia's most respected research institutions. It was there that his research identity truly took shape, refined through international academic exposure and a growing passion for understanding how structures respond to extreme conditions. Today, Dr. Abro serves as a Senior Research Fellow at Ulster University, pursuing research at the intersection of structural performance, material innovation, and long-term sustainability.

Dr. Naveed Alam is a Lecturer in Civil Engineering at Ulster University, based at the internationally recognised Fire Safety Engineering Research and Technology Centre (FireSERT). He completed his PhD at Ulster University, with doctoral research focused on the structural response of slim floor systems under fire, followed by large-scale experimental investigations into compartment travelling fires. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Prior to joining Ulster University in 2020, Dr. Alam built extensive experience across both academia and industry, serving as a site engineer, structural engineer, and project manager on Disaster Risk Mitigation projects, and leading disaster response teams in the field. His earlier research includes the development of damage probability matrices and fragility assessments for existing building stock, with direct relevance to earthquake preparedness.

His research portfolio spans travelling fires, slim floors in fire, collapse mechanisms, fire performance of concrete with alternative cementitious materials, modular construction, and structures under seismic loads. He has cultivated a broad international research network across the UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and is currently at the forefront of a largely unexplored field the fire performance of self-healing concrete.

Our Story

The Collaboration

Our research is motivated by a clear and largely unaddressed gap in the scientific literature. While self-healing concrete has gained considerable attention for its ability to autonomously repair cracks and extend structural service life, its behaviour under fire conditions has remained almost entirely unstudied. No comprehensive analysis exists examining how self-healing mechanisms perform when subjected to the extreme thermal stresses of a fire event. This is not a minor omission — fire remains one of the most critical and destructive hazards that civil infrastructure must contend with, and this gap demands urgent scientific attention.

Based at Ulster University's FireSERT Centre, we are undertaking what we believe to be pioneering experimental and analytical work in this domain. Through rigorous laboratory testing, we aim to characterise the fire response of self-healing concrete, identify the conditions under which healing mechanisms remain effective, and establish a scientific foundation that does not yet exist.

Vission

The implications of this research extend well beyond the laboratory. Structures that can heal themselves after fire damage have the potential to fundamentally alter how we approach post-disaster recovery, infrastructure maintenance, and long-term sustainability in the built environment. Post-fire self-healing reduces the need for demolition and reconstruction, directly cutting the waste and carbon emissions associated with cement production. In fire-vulnerable regions around the world, structures with enhanced healing capacity could achieve significantly longer service lives — lowering overall CO₂ footprints and contributing meaningfully to global low-carbon development goals.

We are at the beginning of this journey. The experiments are ahead of us, as are the publications, the data, and the discoveries. But the direction is clear, the foundation is strong, and the question that drives us is that how does self-healing concrete survive fire?, is one whose answer the world genuinely needs.