PhD Students
Hao Chen
PhD student in Structural Materials
Hao Chen is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. His research background includes low-carbon cementitious materials, the rheology of cementitious materials, and the life cycle of Portland cement. His current research is driven by the goal of decarbonizing the cement industry. In particular, he focuses on applying advanced characterization tools such as SEM, XRD, and NMR to fundamentally investigate the reactivity of metakaolin in LC³ (limestone calcined clay cement) systems, aiming to accelerate the effective adoption of low-carbon cement technologies.
Kyle Wong
PhD student in Structural Materials
Kyle Wong is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley in 2025, being awarded the Berkeley Graduate Fellowship and the Tsuneo Sekine Scholarship. His research background includes low-carbon strategies for the production and recycling of Portland cement, applications of thermal plasma in clinkerization of recycled concrete, novel methods for self-healing concrete, and the deionization effect of calcined layered double hydroxides (CLDH) in hydrated cement. His current research focuses on characterization methods for cement hydration and C-S-H formation, specifically in the analysis of C-S-H in blended cements. Other research interests include fracture mechanics of concrete and micromechanics of cement hydration products. Kyle is currently conducting research under the guidance of Prof. Franco Zunino as a part of the SCiM Research Group.
Marcus Cheung
PhD student in Structural Materials
Marcus Cheung is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Bath, UK, where his dissertation, “What it Takes for the Cement Sector to Reach Net Zero,” was awarded the Mike Barnes Prize for top undergraduate research. After completing his master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, Marcus worked in several low-carbon concrete startups in the United States, focusing on the R&D of novel cementitious materials and filing several patents related to carbon-capturing binders and processes. He is now conducting research on Ultra Green Concrete (UGC), specifically on low-paste-volume concrete, under the guidance of Prof. Zunino in the SCiM Research Group.
Paolo Camesasca
PhD student – ETH Zurich
Paolo Camesasca is a PhD student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich) in the Physical Chemistry of Building Materials group. He completed his Bachelor and Master degrees in chemical engineering at Politecnico di Milano with a master thesis on the continuous biosynthesis of therapeutic oligonucleotides. Since January 2023 he is working on the development of tailor-made chemical admixtures for ultra-green concrete under the supervision of Prof. Franco Zunino. His work is part of Dr. Zunino’s Ambizione fellowship granted by the SNSF to develop a new generation of low-carbon, high-performance concrete formulations.
