A.L. Ruiz Robles (Angie)

I am a PhD candidate at the Construction Management and Engineering Group, University of Twente. I am a civil engineer passionate about roads. Interested in the research of road infrastructure systems by analyzing processes that lead to more sustainable development.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in civil engineering with an emphasis on road infrastructure from Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. Before pursuing my master’s degree, I did an internship at CEMEX, a multinational building materials company. During this period, I provided support and assistance for the development of pavement design proposals.

While I was doing my master's, I worked as a Research Assistant in the construction management group of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. During this time, I conducted studies related to sustainable practices focused on how to successfully manage and develop road infrastructure projects by applying system dynamics and decision-making approaches. After my master's, I kept working at Universidad de los Andes supporting a research project focused on evaluating carbon abatement strategies in the Colombian social housing sector. My experience has been fundamental to understanding the importance of analyzing infrastructure components from systemic perspectives if we want to find efficient solutions that contribute to the sustainability of the sector.

Faculty of Engineering Technology (ET), Integrated Project Delivery (IPD)

My PhD-project - funded by RWS and VBW - is part of the Asfaltimpuls project. It intends to raise the understanding of the process that leads to the implementation of sustainable practices in the asphalt sector. It is not fully understood how practices are implemented; it involves multiple stakeholders and coordinating among them is an iterative, usually informal, and complicated process. Promising sustainability innovations may get stuck in debate, disagreement and confusion. Which of the sustainability innovations are currently implemented and which are not? Which actors and decision makers are involved in the conception and development of sustainable practices? How do they interact? What causes hold ups in the process? What gets these processes stuck of move forward? These and other questions are addressed in my PhD project, which seeks to develop handles and guidelines for stakeholders to speed up the implementation of sustainability innovations.

Over the last year, I have been actively conducting interviews as part of an exploratory stage to gain a deep understanding of the process that leads to sustainable innovations being implemented in the Dutch sector. Specifically, to identify how actors and interactions play a role in the various stages of the process and the main challenges in the process such as unclear assessment standards, lack of collaboration direction, and communication concerns inside and among organizations. The exploratory study sparked new research avenues, it shows that the main challenges in the implementation process are connected and share roots in the structure and interactions of the system. Therefore, I aim to understand how actors interact and reach common ground to bring innovations into practice, gain better insights into the complexities of introducing new innovations, and identify key drivers that facilitate this process.