Aswathy Rajendran

Research interests

Research interest includes sustainable binders, waste valorization and carbon sequestration in materials. 

Strategic themes

• CO2 sequestration in pavement materials: Research on scalable effective methods of developing carbon sink materials for pavement 
• Circular economy: Incorporate recycled low-carbon embodied materials in the material flow of pavement-making 
• Life Cycle Analysis: Validate the carbon offsetting of the pavement materials and process 

Research project 

Road infrastructure spans the usage of a wide variety of materials - concrete, steel, asphalt, plastic, and many more. Most of these materials are carbon-intensive and contribute significantly to CO2 emissions in their manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance phases. 

Aswathy’s research focuses on various approaches of CO2 sequestration for road infrastructure materials and aims to propose and validate on the most efficient methods of carbon offsetting for the pavements. 

Biography

Aswathy Rajendran is an MRes + PhD student at the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment (FIBE2 CDT). She is supervised by Prof. Abir Al-Tabbaa (Academic) and Dr. Chrysoula Litina (National Highways).  

Aswathy completed her Bachelors in Civil Engineering from T.K.M College, India and Masters by research from IIT Madras, India. Her MS research was focused on evaluating performance of polymer modified cement mortars at various exposure conditions.  

Prior to joining Cambridge, she had worked as a concrete research scientist at two leading cement companies in India where she had the opportunity to work in various sustainability projects for cement and concrete systems.