Rate My Professor Emmanouil Kakouris

Dr Emmanouil Kakouris serves as Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering within the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick. He earned his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2019, focusing on computational modelling of fracture in materials and structures. Prior to that, he obtained an MSc in Analysis and Design of Earthquake Resistant Structures in 2014 and an MEng in Civil Engineering in 2012, both from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, graduating with distinction in the former. After completing his doctorate, Kakouris worked as a Research Associate at the University of Nottingham on a collaborative project with Schlumberger, investigating injection-induced vibrations from hydraulic fracturing processes. He then spent four years in industry as a Research & Design Engineer at Roughan & O’Donovan Consulting Engineers in Ireland, contributing to European and international research projects as well as large-scale transport infrastructure developments in Ireland and the United Kingdom. In 2022, he joined the University of Warwick in his current academic role.

Kakouris's research specializations encompass computational mechanics, damage modelling in materials, multiscale modelling through computational homogenization, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods in engineering, intelligent engineering systems, asset management, probabilistic evaluation of systems under uncertainty, and resilience, vulnerability, and risk assessment of critical infrastructure. Notable publications include 'Phase-field material point method for brittle fracture' (International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 2017), 'Material point method for crack propagation in anisotropic media: a phase-field approach' (Archives of Applied Mechanics, 2018), 'Phase-field material point method for dynamic brittle fracture with isotropic and anisotropic surface energy' (Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 2019), and 'A generalised phase‐field multi‐scale finite element method for brittle fracture' (International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 2020). He received the Hermes Fellowship from the University of Nottingham in 2018 (£20,000) for predictive modelling of injection-induced vibrations due to fracking (I2FRAC project). As a peer reviewer for prestigious journals such as Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering (Elsevier), International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering (Wiley), Archives of Applied Mechanics (Springer), and Computational Methods in Structural Engineering (Frontiers), Kakouris contributes to the academic field. He teaches civil engineering design modules to full-time undergraduate students and Degree Apprentices, serving as Module Leader for ES3G8 Integrated Project. His ongoing projects include the Met2Adapt initiative under the European Commission Horizon Europe programme (2026-2030, €4,154,903.64), P-DAM (Monash-Warwick Alliance, 2025), and multiple EPSRC-funded efforts on artificial intelligence-driven phase-field fracture simulations and multiscale material damage modelling (2024-2028).