Biographical Information

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Employment History

● Principal of the Technical Innovation Consultancy

● Dean of the Faculty of Technology, Kingston University

and Director of the Sustainable Technology Research Centre .

● Mowlem Professor and Head of the School of Civil Engineering at Kingston.

● Head of Technical Marketing and Standards – British Cement Association

● Manager of the Building Group – Cement and Concrete Association

● Head of a Research Group – Construction Research Department - Cement and Concrete Association

● Research Engineer - Construction Research Department - Cement and Concrete Association

Research Background

John Roberts has worked on masonry and concrete related projects throughout his career. As a research engineer he was responsible for a variety of projects on behalf of the Cement and Concrete Association including the control tests for a wall testing programme carried out in co-operation with the Building Research Establishment. In conjunction with a range of wall tests he then investigated testing procedures for masonry including design tests, control tests and compliance tests. A further extension of this work was the investigation of testing machine performance and the preparation of a machine performance specification. Following an extensive review of the literature available, a programme of research was commenced to investigate the structural performance of reinforced concrete masonry. This programme was pursued over a number of years and more than 100 reinforced blockwork elements were instrumented and tested to destruction. In order to investigate the long-term durability of reinforced masonry, he developed an electrical resistance technique which enabled the potential for corrosion to be monitored non-destructively. Five sites were instrumented and these were monitored for a period of ten years.

Subsequently he managed a research group which tackled a number of projects including the effect of restraint condition on elements subjected to thermal movements, the optimum quantity and disposition of reinforcement to control cracking in reinforced concrete walls, construction joints in water retaining structures, the tensile strain capacity of lightweight concrete, the design and performance of floors subjected to point loading, shear behaviour of reinforced concrete blockwork, rain penetration through walling, the thermal performance of walling, the performance of external insulation systems and joint systems for precast concrete tunnel segments.

Recent research

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