Stella Kapodistria

Welcome to my home page. Here you can find information regarding my professional activities, course material, and various announcements.

The Research Program “Designing Systems for Informed Resilience Engineering (DeSIRE)” was awarded in response to the 4TU-call “High Tech for a Sustainable Future”.

The DeSIRE Research Program builds upon the newly established 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering (RE). It unites several excellent existing research groups across different disciplines within the 4TU universities under the umbrella of resilience. The 4TU RE Centre and the DeSIRE Research Program will be aligned, leveraging the existing research, and academic and engineering networks to create an international driving force for innovation in resilience engineering.

The awarded funding supports 15 new tenure track positions that complement the existing expertise to advance the national resilience engineering school towards a new level. DeSIRE aims to conduct excellent research of societal value by connecting advances in resilience engineering (RE) with adaptive principles of societal resilience. DeSIRE consolidates the top expertise with the ambition to leverage the national RE research towards the world-leading RE center creating a momentum for science contributing to a lasting societal impact. By consolidating in-depth engineering competences, advanced research methods and evolutionary approaches for decision making, this research program strives to accelerate the knowledge base, methods and societal impact of RE.

This ambitious program brings together 43 participants from 12 faculties at all four universities of the 4TU (UT: ET, MBS, ITC; DUT: CEG, Arch, EEMCS, TPM; TU/e: MCS, EE, IEIS; WUR: PS, ES). In particular, the 4TU Resilience Engineering think-tank: consists of: Dr. Ir. Marjolein Dohmen-Janssen – managing director, Dr. Stella Kapodistria, Dr. Lan Ge, Dr. Pascale le Blanc, Dr. Tina Comes, Dr. Irna van der Molen, Dr. ir. Joanne Vinke-De Kruijf.

A changing climate and growing population in a world that is more and more interconnected, make societies vulnerable to incidents, disasters and prolonged stress. 4TU Resilience Engineering combines craft, knowledge and expertise from scientists and engineers in different fields to tackle the grand challenges of today and tomorrow in building resilient societies.

RESILIENCE ENGINEERING 
How can a city cope with prolonged heat stress or a terrorist attack? How does farmland bounce back after a flood? And how can we build resilient societies where the impact of incidents, disasters and prolonged stress can be reduced or absorbed?

By looking at the entire system of human, natural and technical factors, the 4TU Resilience Engineering Centre aims to gain analytic understanding of resilience in complex, interconnected systems. Furthermore, the centre works on developing technological, sociological and design solutions to create resilient systems. 

MISSION
The purpose of the 4TU RE Centre is to bring about and facilitate a Resilience Engineering movement. The 4TU RE Centre is a place where experts from different fields meet, exchange knowledge and ideas, learn together and from each other. By bringing scientist from the four technical universities in the Netherlands together, the centre aims at building the capacity to be a leading international knowledge centre.

4TU RE deliberately builds connections with societal institutions outside of academia. Working together with people in the field warrants the practical relevance of the research programmes and helps disseminate the insights gained.

ORGANISATION
4TU RE is a virtual centre, connecting resilience experts from the four technical universities in the Netherlands.

IAM master's student Corné Suijkerbuijk, won the first prize in the annual World Class Maintenance (WCM) competition for his master thesis on the topic of “Integration of preventive maintenance and inventory management for healthcare systems” at Philips Healthcare. Corné investigated a highly challenging topic and worked towards the realization of an industrial solution, while opening new theoretical paths for future investigation. His thesis deals with the development of approaches for the calculation of the remaining useful lifetime of critical components of healthcare machines and for their cost-optimal preventive maintenance schedule, while also investigating the effect of the schedule change (from corrective & scheduled to preventive maintenance) on the supply chain level.

Corné wrote his MSc thesis under the joint supervision of Dr. Stella Kapodistria and Dr. Marko Boon, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and of Dr. Dimitrios Mavroeidis, Senior Research Scientist at Philips. The thesis was written in the context of the TU/e-Philips flagship on the research program of Smart Maintenance and within the DSC/e Research Program Smart Manufacturing & Maintenance.