Calcined Clays for Sustainable Concrete

Karen Scrivener is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Construction Materials, Department of Materials, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) based in Lausanne, Switzerland. She graduated from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom in Materials Science (1979), and then completed a Ph.D. on the Microstructural Development during the Hydration of Portland Cement at Imperial College in London, remaining there until 1995 as a Royal Society Research fellow and then lecturer. She joined the Central Research Laboratories of Lafarge near Lyon in France in 1995 and was appointed as a professor and head of the Laboratory of Construction Materials, Department of Materials at EPFL in 2001. Her research revolves around the understanding the microstructure, hydration mechanisms, and durability of cementitious materials and, in particular, the invention of LC3 (limestone calcined clay cement) technology that enables a reduction of the CO2 intensity of cement by up to 40%.

Meenakshi Sharma has been an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad, India, since 2022. She obtained her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from IIT Delhi, India, in 2021 and her master’s in construction technology and management from IIT Delhi. In 2021, she was awarded Swiss Government Excellence Scholarships to conduct postdoctoral research at the Laboratory of Construction Materials, Institute of Materials, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. After joining IIT Hyderabad, she has been awarded two grant-in-aid projects to conduct independent research at IIT Hyderabad. Her research interests include experimental and analytical studies of cementitious materials, sustainable cementitious binders, durability and repair of concrete structures, and carbon utilization and storage in cementitious materials.

Franco Zunino has been an assistant professor in construction materials at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2025. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020, where he stayed as a postdoctoral researcher until 2022. His doctoral thesis was recognized in 2021 with the Nanocem 2020 prize, awarded to the best thesis in the field of cement and concrete science worldwide by a panel of international experts. In 2022, he received the Wason Medal, awarded by the American Concrete Institute (ACI) to the most meritorious paper published in 2021 in their journals. The same year, he was awarded a prestigious Ambizione fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation to conduct independent research at ETH Zürich.