ELSA QOKU

Elsa Qoku is the current Research Group Leader for the working group Microstructure and Modelling at RWTH Aachen. Prior that she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, where she gained expertise in advanced synchrotron characterization techniques. Elsa obtained her Doctoral degree from Technical University of Freiberg, in Germany. Her dissertation focused on the characterization and quantification of phase assemblage in cementitious systems. The work was awarded as the best PhD from the German Chemical Society (GDCh), for the fundamental contribution in better understanding the chemistry and microstructure development of calcium aluminate cement rich binders. She also worked as a visiting researcher at the group of Solid-State NMR of Inorganic Materials at Aarhus University. Elsa’s research interests involve:

· Microstructure and hydration mechanism of CAC cements and other low CO2 binders.

· Synchrotron x-ray scattering and imaging techniques (i.e., XRPD, PDF, ptychography) as tools for cement hydration and microstructure investigation.

· Physico-chemical cement -admixture interaction mechanisms