Achille Paolone is Full Professor of Structural Mechanics at the Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome, a position he has held since 2007. He graduated in Civil and Building Engineering in 1988 with full marks and honours and received his PhD in Structural Engineering in 1994, having joined the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in 1990 as a researcher of the National Group for the Defence against Earthquakes. He was Assistant Professor at the University of L'Aquila from 1996 to 2001 and Associate Professor at Sapienza from 2001 to 2007. He served as Head of the Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering from 2016 to 2022 and was a member of the Academic Board of the PhD Programme in Structural and Geotechnical Engineering from 2007 to 2024, serving as its Coordinator from 2013 to 2016. From 2019 to the 2025-2026 academic year he directed the Master's programme in "Analysis, Diagnostics and Monitoring of Structures and Infrastructures", and he was Chair of the XXIV AIMETA Conference (Rome, 2019). He has been a member of the National Board of the ICAR/08 disciplinary sector and President of the Teaching Committee of the Civil Engineering degree programme.
He teaches Structural Mechanics II in the Bachelor's programme in Civil Engineering and Mechanics of Two-Dimensional Structures in the Master's programme in Structural Engineering at the Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering of Sapienza. He is the author of five textbooks on structural mechanics for engineering and architecture students, including Rigid Structures with Point-Flexibility (Springer, 2025). His research began in the field of earthquake engineering, with studies on the seismic vulnerability of reinforced concrete buildings and on passive control devices, and later extended to the dynamics and stability of elastic structures, with particular reference to perturbation methods for the analysis of multiple bifurcations and to aeroelastic interaction phenomena in slender structures.
His current interests also include multi-scale computational homogenisation of brittle materials and masonry, the modelling of thin-walled open-section beams, dynamic structural and damage identification, and the safety assessment and monitoring of existing bridges and viaducts; on these last topics he has been scientific coordinator of more than twenty research agreements with infrastructure authorities and companies, including the FABRE Consortium, Autostrade per l'Italia, Strada dei Parchi, Italferr and Metro C.
He is the author of more than 120 publications, 75 of which are indexed in Scopus. He was national scientific coordinator of the PRIN 2008-2010 project "Mechanics of microstructured materials: multi-scale identification, optimisation and active control", a member of the Rome Research Unit in six further PRIN projects, and principal investigator of the European ECOLEADER project "A theoretical and experimental investigation of cable-stayed-beam dynamics". He is a member of the editorial board of Mathematical Problems in Engineering and a reviewer for numerous international journals in solid and structural mechanics.
Selected publications:
[1] Ciminelli, F., Bernardini, D., Lofrano, E., Paolone, A., Multi-risk assessment of bridges and viaducts according to classes and logical operators: conceptual analysis and statistical paths, (2025) Journal of Civil Structural Health Monitoring, 15 (7), pp. 2159-2182
[2] Brunetti, M., Favata, A., Paolone, A., Vidoli, S., A mixed variational principle for the Föppl-von Kármán equations, (2020) Applied Mathematical Modelling, 79, pp. 381-391
[3] Di Re, P., Addessi, D., Paolone, A., Mixed beam formulation with cross-section warping for dynamic analysis of thin-walled structures, (2019) Thin-Walled Structures, 141, pp. 554-575
[4] Ciambella, J., Paolone, A., Vidoli, S., Identification of soft viscoelastic materials at low frequencies: performance, ill-conditioning and extrapolation capabilities of fractional and exponential models, (2014) Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 37, pp. 286-298
[5] Addessi, D., Sacco, E., Paolone, A., Cosserat model for periodic masonry deduced by nonlinear homogenization, (2010) European Journal of Mechanics - A/Solids, 29 (4), pp. 724-737