Dr Qiuchen Lu, UCL

RAEng / Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships 2024

In recent decades, the worldwide escalation of flood events has become more frequent and more devastating, largely driven by the adverse effects of climate change. In the UK, escalating flood increasingly affect people and property, intensifying pressure on national road networks: The A303 has been closed for days after heavy rainfall-induced flooding since Storm Ciarán in November 2023. To counter increasing flood impacts on road networks, the UK urgently needs effective techniques and actionable solutions to improve road networks resilience, as stressed by the UK Government.

Dr. Qiuchen Lu’s fellowship, RENEW, aims to improve resilience of road networks in fast-changing flood through capturing cross-domain system interactions with unprecedentedly high spatiotemporal resolution and great interoperability. This will be achieved by developing a cross-domain dynamic people-centric digital twin based Dr.Lu’s previous works of multi-layer digital twins. Two key challenges of protecting road networks under floods (i.e., the complex nature of infrastructure systems and the dynamic nature of flood risks) will be the main focuses of this RENEW. Dr.Lu's fellowship will be fully supported by the DAFNI, Trimble, Vercity, TRL, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER), Loughborough University, Newcastle University, and the Digital Road of Future Program.

Dr. Lu’s research facilitates the transformation of the built environment towards the ‘3S (Smart, Sustainable, reSilient)’ future through digital twins to address the growing challenges of climate change. Dr.Lu was awarded the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) Young Scientist Scheme supported by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and the 2023 UK Digital Innovator Award (Runner-up) by the Digital Women.

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