This week, eleven new associate professors received their appointment decrees from the hands of the Rector of Brno University of Technology Ladislav Janíček. Among them are also Hana Šimonová and Jan Barnat from the Faculty of Civil Engineering.

Associate Professor Hana Šimonová works at the Department of Structural Mechanics, where she introduces the basics of the field to new students. Since this year she has been supervising the Building Mechanics section of the Student Scientific and Professional Activities at FAST. Between 2010 and 2022, she has completed a number of international internships, the most important of which is a postdoctoral fellowship of more than one year in total at the Technische Universität Wien, Austria. In her creative professional and scientific research activities, she is mainly interested in fracture and fatigue characteristics of cement-based and cement-free quasi-brittle building materials. In the field of fracture mechanics of brittle matrix materials he cooperates with a number of departments in the Czech Republic and abroad (Austria, Serbia, Poland, Spain and others).

Associate Professor Jan Barnat focuses his professional and scientific activities at the Institute of Metal and Wood Structures FAST mainly on the issue of additional anchoring of metal and wood structures. He deals with solutions of construction details, the action of individual anchors in the contact member, description of the properties of materials for anchoring, parameters affecting the resistance of anchor contact members and experimental verification of theoretical knowledge. He is the principal investigator of two external grant projects and has been invited as co-investigator in ten others. He regularly publishes in professional journals.

He is also actively involved in teaching activities and improving the quality of teaching. He has supervised more than eighty successful diploma and bachelor theses, and teaches courses across all years of study.