New at ETH Zurich: Walter Kaufmann

What motivated you to come back to ETH Zurich last year?
The job of a structural engineer is very varied and diverse and presents new challenges every day. I had also done my fair share to contribute to the successful development of the company I led. So the move back to ETH Zurich, after 15 years in professional practice, was by no means a foregone conclusion. For me, one of the deciding factors was the unique opportunity to carry out research at one of the world's leading universities.

In particular, ETH Zurich has an outstanding infrastructure for carrying out large-scale experiments, which have fascinated me since my time as a doctoral student here. Secondly, I enjoy teaching and working with young people, something which is possible in industry too, but forms a much bigger part of my work at ETH.

What fascinates you about bridges?
Every new bridge is essentially a prototype, but of course it has to work properly right from the start. The appeal of the design process lies in the need to reconcile the always different, often very complex and sometimes also contradictory requirements and framework conditions – such as the style, the site and traffic flow during construction – into a cohesive overall concept. Working in an interdisciplinary design team and being in constructive dialogue with experts in other fields is incredibly stimulating.

Assessing the state of existing bridges is often far more challenging than doing the calculations for a new one. Unfortunately, some clients have not yet understood this and commission inadequately qualified engineers to do these supposedly more straightforward tasks. An assessment is particularly challenging when, according to the standards for new construction projects, the bridge should really have collapsed years ago.

Often structural engineers can use advanced methods of analysis to prove that the bridge is structurally safe, and, in the light of increased costs and traffic disruption, this must always be the aim. Structural engineers need to have an extensive understanding of load-bearing and deformation behaviour, for which it extremely useful not only to use analytical models but also to have experience derived from the large-scale experiments I referred to earlier.

What would you hope to convey to your students?
Of course, I have to convey to my students the technical knowledge that they need in order to continue their studies and for their future careers. But they also need to learn to analyse problems for themselves and work out strategies for solving them. With the benefit of my own practical experience, I would also like to try to convey to students the fascination of our profession, encourage them in their creativity and in understanding the kind of engineer they want to be, as well as introducing them to the core tasks of structural engineering – structural design and load-bearing structural analysis. And it would be great if I could give them a healthy dose of professional pride and a strong sense of responsibility along the way, as well.