Olivia Wu’s Engineered Solutions for Transitioning Concrete

When asked why she’s drawn to engineered solutions for concrete, our new community of practice chair Olivia Wu paused only to take a breath.

Concrete is fascinating because it’s one of the most used materials. And, it’s foundational to infrastructure development…

Olivia Wu is quick to point out, it’s also got huge potential to reduce carbon emissions in the built environment—essential if we are to reach our net-zero goals and help slam the brakes on climate change.

“The way we innovate concrete technology can make a big difference in terms of the global impact,” Olivia said. “And even small advancements can lead to big improvement in reducing environmental impact.”

“At the same time, engineered solutions for concrete also improve longevity, safety durability, and cost efficiency in buildings.”

The makings of a community chair

Olivia would be donning a white lab coat today if it wasn’t for a surprise turn in her career.

She’d done a bachelor degree in biomedical engineering before discovering her passion for the built environment, and pursued her master degree in civil engineering.

“In civil engineering, I feel like I can apply engineering knowledge to practical solutions, to provide sustainable and optimised concrete solutions to the industry.”

As a consulting engineer for D&C Consultants, she did structural designs and structural inspections, and would go on site to certify concrete pours.

There, she was part of a team that designed one of the biggest precast structures in Australia.

The M-City development in Clayton is a commercial high rise with offices, shops, residences and a cinema and Olivia designed, inspected and signed off on the concrete pour.

Experiences like these led to her current role as a product portfolio manager with Reid Construction Systems, a supplier of construction materials, where she continues to work with concrete for residential, commercial and infrastructure projects.

“My goal has always been to merge the technical performance side with the practical side and continue to push boundaries of what concrete can achieve.”

In case working full time with concrete isn’t enough, Olivia is also the vice president of the Victorian chapter of the Concrete Institute of Australia.

“There, we look at things like, how do we bring people together to share knowledge? We work on webinars and seminars on recycled materials and low carbon concrete—so all the hot topics that are sustainability-related.”

Engineering the transition

Olivia believes engineers play an important role in improving the sustainability of concrete construction.

“They’re not only responsible for developing solutions, but also for implementing them,” Olivia said.

Her position very much aligns with ours at Smartcrete, where we believe in supporting engineers to take a leading role in transitioning concrete. It’s the reason we set up our research stream in engineered solutions and the corresponding community of practice.

And like Olivia, we believe there are challenges that engineers, and those who work with them, need to address.

“One challenge facing engineers is having common practices or understanding and standards, and applying and integrating those across the industry so that we all speak the same language,” Olivia said.

“And another challenge is integrating those practices at every stage of the supply chain, from raw materials to end of life management.”

Just as this can be said broadly for engineers working with concrete, so too can it be said for engineers working to bring concrete innovations from the imaginations of researchers into construction schedules.

Concrete innovations like supplementary cementitious materials, calcined clay, low carbon concrete and recycled concrete promise to make concrete more sustainable but are only beginning to trickle into the supply chain.

As far as barriers go, Olivia also called out the elephant in the room— “the unwillingness to adopt new methods because of uncertainties.”

“There’s still a gap between the research findings and the how from a practical perspective,” she explained. “The industry needs a bit of help to understand better and develop common practices.”

That’s where our community of practice comes in.

This year’s community

Olivia will chair our Community of Practice (Engineered Solutions) alongside our 2 other chairs Arun Arunothayan (Sustainable Concrete) and Gavin Chadbourn (Asset Management).

Olivia recently took over the chairing role from Daksh Baweja, who led the community these past 2 years. She plans carry the torch for knowledge and experience sharing.

“The community of practice will facilitate collaboration and foster information, and then also bring together a diverse set of perspectives, because concrete is quite broad. Concrete constructions especially,” she said.

“I think it’s important to bring together that diverse set of perspectives, and build that collaboration to accelerate the development and adoption of new solutions.”

Diverse perspectives in collaboration—that’s music to our ears.

Also good to hear were Olivia’s thoughts on the community’s role in supporting industry to adopt the next wave of concrete technologies.

“The community of practice is important because it helps bridge the gap between research and practical applications.”

Sign up below for our Community of Practice (Engineered Solutions) – Innovative Footing for Light-weight Structures in Expansive Soil on March 18th. Or view the 2025 schedule.

Sign up today