0. Let's start!

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Ciao!

 

My name is Maria Barriera and I’m 27 years old. I come from Lecce, a city of about 95 000 inhabitants in the South of Italy. I’m a civil engineer and, since October 2017, a PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique, hired by Eiffage.

This is my first post on this blog that I created to share periodically my experiences along this journey as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow. So if you’re curious and you’d like to know more, keep on following me and maybe you’ll find that engineers are not as boring as the stereotypes show!

Going back in time, I did my studies at the University of Salento where I got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Civil Engineering. Was I born with the passion for civil engineering? Well not exactly….:-) As far as I can remember when I was a child I wanted to be an English teacher at primary school, then when I was a little older I was sure I would become a police inspector or a judge, and finally I ended up becoming a civil engineer and flying to Lyon as part of the SMARTI ETN. C’est la vie!

Actually this is not my first experience abroad since during my master I carried out an internship at the University of Minho in Guimarães (Portugal). If you didn’t know, Guimarães is a really fascinating city in the North of Portugal, known as the place where Portugal was born. I spent three months there, during which I also travelled around the country, and visited one of the most beautiful places where I’ve been so far: Cabo da Roca, the Europe’s most westerly point. If you have the chance to go to Portugal, don’t miss it!

   


Currently I’m based in Lyon and I’m working on my project called “Nano Asphalt”, which is aimed to the integration of a novel nanosensor technology in the road pavement with the goal to monitor real time vehicle passage and to evaluate continuously pavement durability during its lifetime. This sensing technology will be a part of a more global system of data acquisition, interpretation, and visualization. The project is fruit of a collaboration between Eiffage, LPICM (Laboratoire de Physique des Interfaces et des Couches Minces), IFSTTAR (Institut français des sciences et technologies des transports, de l'aménagement et des réseaux), and the University of Nottingham. I find my project really stimulating and interesting, that’s why I applied for it: imagine if we can develop a tool able to support preventive maintenance. It will improve the durability of road infrastructures resulting in costs reduction. This follows the global view of the SMARTI Work Package 2, called “SMARTI Prototypes” aimed at investigating the possibility of developing smart infrastructures components for roads, railways, and airport. For more information you can have a look to our website: http://smartietn.eu/ . There you can also find more details about the overall project SMARTI and the other projects and fellows, as we are 15 in total.


That’s all for today. We’ll have time to go through several topics together. 😊
Feel free to contact me for any question.

Ciao and see you soon!
Maria.
 

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