UPC’s university community mourns the loss of Professor Benjamín Suárez, PhD in Civil Engineering, and professor at Barcelona School of Civil Engineering, who died on January 24th 2022.
Benjamín Suárez was a full professor at UPC BarcelonaTech and Barcelona School of Civil Engineering, PhD in Civil Engineering, head of the Fundació Politècnica de Catalunya (FPC), from February 2015 to March 2020, and head of Barcelona School of Civil Engineering between 1994 and 1997. Benjamín Suárez not only was a member of the Department of Strength of Materials and Structural Engineering, which he directed from 2010 to 2013, and researcher of the UPC's Computational Mechanics in Continuous Media Group, but also Vice-rector for Academic Planning in the 2002-2003 period and co-founder of the International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE). He was also commissioned for the integration of UPC studies in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and coordinated ANECA's European Convergence and the Spanish Service Science Management and Engineering Forum (SSME). Likewise, he was secretary of the Advisory Council of the Quality Agency of the University System of Castilla y León (ACSUCYL), member of the EURACE Accreditation Commission (IIE_ANECA) and advisor to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports.
Benjamín Suárez's research activity focused on the field of numerical methods applied to complex civil engineering problems such as dams, harbors and tunnels. He published scientific articles in notorious national and international journals such as Engineering Computations, Computers and Structures or Computational Mechanics, among others. He directed and participated in international pedagogical consulting projects, as well as continuous training of academic, managerial and administrative staff at Universidad de la Plata, in Argentina. He was also involved in the curricular redesign of the competencies of engineering studies at Austral University of Chile. In 2010 he received the Medal for Professional Merit from the College of Civil Engineers of Madrid.