The European Convention for Constructional Steelwork ECCS created Charles Massonnet Award to recognize a prominent scientist who highly contributed to the advancement of scientific and technical support to constructional steelwork, and who had worked or is working in a Technical Committee of ECCS as a Full Member, as a Chairman or as Secretary of one of the mentioned committees. The Charles Massonnet Award is presented every year by an ECCS member association.

Frantisek Wald who stands behind the CBFEM method concentrates on the connection and fire design of steel structures. He prepared the component model for column bases and the component based finite element model of joints. He works in ECCS Technical Committee 10 – Structural joints and in Project team for preparation of standard – EN 1993-1-8:2020.

He also prepared and validated an analytical model for fire design of roof sheeting using membrane action. After Sept 11, he studied experimentally the robustness of multi-storey building in Cardington during the sevenths fire test on building. He served as Chairman of the EU COST TU action Integrated fire engineering and response (IFER) which focused on cooperation between the research community and fire brigades.

In his career, Frantisek supervised 17 PhD, 117 Master and 125 Bachelor theses. He created Leonardo da Vinci project and educational materials CeStruCo (Continuing Education in Structural Connections) and is currently the manager of Erasmus Mundus Master Program Sustainable Constructions under Natural Hazards and Catastrophic events – SUSCOS_M.

Frantisek works at Czech Technical University in Prague as Professor and Head of the Department of Steel and Timber Structures.

Congratulations!