Educational Activities
EAC - Educational Activities Committee 
Karen Scrivener, EAC Chair
One of the main purposes of the Educational Activities Committee (EAC) of RILEM is to broaden the education of both PhD students and the professional community through promotion of interesting and informative one-week PhD courses and seminars on subjects of relevance to researchers working in specific areas. RILEM EAC is responsible for RILEM activities in the field of education. These include a number of different tasks, of which the basic and most important one is the courses to which we grant scientific sponsorship. Though RILEM EAC has only existed for a handful of years, our sponsored courses have been enjoyed by more than 2000 participants and about 200 teachers.
If you intend to organize a course that falls within RILEM’s topic areas, EAC will be happy to consider your proposal for potential sponsorship (in the form of scientific approval). Please note that EAC PhD course proposals are reviewed twice per year by EAC members during RILEM spring convention and RILEM annual week standing committee meetings. If you would like to be a student at a RILEM EAC sponsored course, our organizers look forward to welcoming you.
At the RILEM home page you can read more about our mode of work in RILEM EAC including activities other than those described above. You will also find the upcoming events sponsored by RILEM EAC on the calendar.
EAC activities started on Dec 2006 under the impulsion of Prof. Ole Mejlhede Jensen, who chaired the committee until 2014. He was then replaced as EAC chair by Prof. Douglas Hooton until August 2019, and the current chair is Prof Karen Scrivener. Ms. Aurelie Martingale, RILEM Managing Assistant, joined EAC as secretary in March 2022.
ROC&TOK Webinars
In November 2020, a new monthly webinar series was launched: the RILEM Online Conferences & Transfer of Knowledge (ROC&TOK), designed to give information about how to communicate and teach subjects, related to the activities of RILEM and its technical committees.
The webinars take place online on the first Thursday of each month, except for January and August. Each webinar is scheduled with a 30-min presentation followed by a 30-min Q&A session.
The aim is to bring new, untaught or updated research into the classroom as well as new pedagogy on how to teach these topics. The webinars are a refined and thoughtful approach to what should be taught and how it should be taught. Lecturers consolidate and summarize research that should be conveyed to undergrad and grad students.
The webinars target professors and senior PhDs and are delivered by experts invited by the ROC&TOK committee (EAC Chair, Prof. K. Scrivener, and EAC member, Prof. P. Suraneni). The webinars are open to all interested, including students and those working in industry.
EAC members can be found here.
Educational Portal ONline (EPON)
Educational Portal ONline (EPON) can be considered a “shop window”, or a web portal for educational resources on RILEM-relevant topics including chemistry, concrete, testing, etc. Links to the various educational resources are provided, which include webinars, talks, courses, etc. This list will include recorded EAC PhD seminars. This portal is aligned with the EAC objectives of broadening the education of PhD students and the professional community through promotion of interesting and informative webinars, talks, courses, and other relevant material.
We are open to your contributions for this list. If you have material that you think would be useful in EPON, please send it to us, emailing Aurelie Martingale (assistant@rilem.org), Judith Hardy (j.hardy@rilem.org), and Prannoy Suraneni (suranenip@miami.edu). We will review and vet the material, and then add it to the list. Here is the EPON link.
Mode of Work
The "Educational Activities Committee", EAC is responsible for RILEM activities in the field of education. Within this area RILEM EAC is responsible for tasks such as:
- Proposition of new RILEM educational activities (New course proposal template)
- Approval of new RILEM educational activities, providing general organizational guidelines and giving advice to the host
- Monitoring of on-going RILEM educational activities
- Review of completed RILEM educational activities
- Serving as the contact point for educational activities outside RILEM
A RILEM member may propose an educational activity to be sponsored by RILEM EAC by submitting a proposal to the RILEM EAC chair or secretary. The sponsorship is a scientific sponsorship, i.e. it is an acknowledgement of the educational qualities of the event but it does not involve financial support from RILEM.
Activities that RILEM EAC sponsor include in particular Doctoral courses and short seminars for the profession (practicing engineers), and Educational publications (including text books). Information about some past activities are given below. Upcoming educational events can be found on the calendar.
In addition to a number of single events RILEM is scientifically sponsoring several doctoral course series. These typically have one occurrence per year which will be announced in this calendar when the dates are fixed. The course series include:
- Multi Scale modeling of Concrete (MMC) (Erik Schlangen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands): MMC final report 2016
- Concrete Microscopy Course (CMC) (Oguzhan Copuroglu, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
- Limestone Calcined Clay Cement doctoral school (Karen Scrivener, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland)
- Chemistry of cement and concrete (Doug Hooton, Toronto University, Canada)
- Modeling of Localized Inelastic Deformation (Milan Jirásek, Czech Technical University, Czech Republic)
- Computational Methods for Building Physics and Construction Materials (Eduardus Koenders, Darmstadt University, Germany) Final report 2021