Passionate about buildings and works of art, Serge Cescotto hesitated between architecture and construction before finally taking the plunge and studying applied sciences at university. After two years spent at the Mons Faculty Polytechnic, he arrived at the University of Liège, attracted by the ‘civil engineering in construction’ option. He gained his degree in 1972.

A leading expert in construction, Professor Massonnet offered him a position as his assistant. ‘An offer that you can’t refuse.’ To his great surprise, he began his appointment with a two and a half year stay in Chile, within the context of an accord with the University of Concepción. There he taught in the new construction department. Back at the ULg in August 1975, he had only three years left to produce his thesis, which he defended in 1978, in the field of digital methods in the mechanics of solids.

There followed a classical academic path. Let us highlight a few dates: he was appointed lecturer in April 1985 and Professor in January 1993. Professor Serge Cescotto today teaches courses on the mechanics of solids and the mechanics of materials. Assisted by numerous professors as well as by the Greisch engineering consultancy group, he also co-ordinates the course on ‘integrated civil engineering projects’ which offers future civil engineers in construction the possibility to mount a complex civil engineering project on an actual real site, and to be confronted by the problems which are always to be found there.

Selection of publications

L. XIANG, S. CESCOTTO, B. ROSSI, A natural neighbour method for materially non linear problems based on Fraeijs de Veubeke variational principle. Acta Mechanica Sinica, vol. 25, pp. 83-93, 2009.

S. CESCOTTO, L. XIANG, L. DUCHÊNE, A Natural Neighbor Method Based on Fraeijs de Veubeke Variational Principle for Elastoplasticity and Fracture Mechanics. Journal of Engineering Materials and Technology, April 2008, Vol. 130.

S. CESCOTTO, L. XIANG, A natural neighbour method for linear elastic problems based on Fraeijs de Veubeke variational principle, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, vol. 71, pp. 1081-1101, 2007.

S. CASTAGNE , A.M. HABRAKEN AND S. CESCOTTO, Application of a damage model to an aluminum alloy, International Journal of Damage Mechanics, 11, N°4, pp. 367-392, 2002.

S. CESCOTTO, M. WAUTERS, A-M. HABRAKEN, Y. ZHU, A fully Coupled Anisotropic Elastoplastic Damage Model, pp. 802-813, Section 9.3 in Handbook of MATERIALS BEHAVIOR MODELS, Jean Lemaître Academic Press, 2001