Personal information
Biography
Santos Sánchez-Cambronero obtained his MSc in Civil Engineering by the University of Castilla la Mancha in 2004 and his PhD in Civil Engineering by the same University in 2008. He completed his postgraduate education with a MSc in Railways and Rail Transport by the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2009.
From September of 2004 he works for the University of Castilla la Mancha where currently is Associate Professor in the Transportation Team of the Civil Engineering School in Ciudad Real.
In this University he has taught in 6 undergraduate courses, 7 of Master or postgraduate degrees some of them international and also for some associations as, since 2013, the Spanish foundation of railways.
He has been director of one very well scored Ph.D Thesis and currently he is director of two PhD student who started their studies last year. Up to now he has been director of 9 Master Thesis and more than 20 Bachelor Thesis (all of them very well scored by the evaluating). With this, he obtained, in 2011 and 2016 favorable reports to his requests for the granting of the five-year terms for teaching merits.
His involvement as a teacher has led to participate in several conferences in education and also to publish several teaching-based research papers related to Project Based Learning (PBL), Learning by Doing or new techniques to teach BIM methodology in Civil Engineering Studies. This works can be found in Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice (2015), Journal of Civil Engineering Education (2021) and Sustainability (2021). He also has participated as in 3 teaching innovation projects and in 3 projects for the science dissemination (one of them as researcher in charge) granted by the Spanish Foundation for the Science and Technology (FECYT).
Regarding to his scientific contributions, his main research interest may be classified in two main research topics:
1. Traffic network modelling and traffic management (both in roadways and in railways) as for example traffic flow network models, where tools as Bayesian networks, or the data from AVI sensors are used to develop new, innovative and efficient models to predict traffic flow in traffic networks. Even a prototype of a low-cost ANPR sensor has been developed to be applied in real projects. Regarding the Railways modelling, he has a good experience in Timetabling optimization on railways networks, where he participate in a project where the alternate double single track was proposed as an alternative of the conventional double track to construct new high speed railway lines in order to reduce a great amount of budget
2. High speed railways design dealing with the problem of the heterogeneity on the value of the vertical track stiffness focusing the efforts on developing a Finite Element Model of a railway section to study the benefits of changing the conventional ballasted track by other kind of section (mixed slab-ballasted track or adding a bituminous mixture layer) and to improve the embankment-structure transitions. On the other hand, a model to improve the railway geometrical design was proposed using the Building Information Modeling (BIM) methodology in order to optimize of its service life.
In order to summarize his relevant contributions, the followings list is presented:
• He is co-author in 35 research papers (12 Q1, 5 Q2, 8 Q3 and 10 more in other quartiles) with more than 925 cites (up to January 2022) with a H index of 15 and I10 index of 16 (google scholar: https://bit.ly/3njE42h). In addition, his ResearchGate Score is 24.05 which is higher than 80% of all ResearchGate members’ scores (https://bit.ly/37dToIg).
• He is co-author in 37 national and international conferences and he also has been invited as guess speaker in some others.
• He is co-author of a book edited by Lambert and of other two chapters related to Bayesian Networks and railways infrastructure.
• He has been researcher in 36 projects (2 as a researcher in charge) some of them granted by public administrations and others granted by private enterprises.
• He is reviewer in 15 research journals.
• He received as a member of the Transportation Team of the Civil Engineering School (UCLM) the price Talgo to the Technological innovation in 2014 (https://bit.ly/3gIDLLS)
With this research background he has obtained in 2010 and 2016, favorable reports to his requests for the granting of the six-year terms for research merits.
In the section of visitor scholar, he spent 6 months in the Institute for Transportation Studies of UC Davis (USA) working with Professor Michael Zhang and some short periods as expert researcher in Lanus University (Argentina) working with Professor Alejandro Tornay. Recently he has granted to travel to the University of Louisville (USA) in June 2022 to work with Professor Monica Gentilli.