Dr. Matthew Perras
Associate Professor of Geological Science and Engineering, School of the Environment
Areas of Expertise:
Dr. Matthew A. Perras is a Professional Geological Engineer (P.Eng.) and an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences.
He has gained over 20 years of academic and practical experience while working at York University, ETH Zurich, and in industry for Hatch Ltd. in the past.
He is interested in all aspects of Geoscience and Geological Engineering, from earthquakes, to geophysics, to ancient and future rock-built infrastructure stability. His research focuses on near surface temporal behaviour of and the influence of environmental factors on crack growth in geological and cementitious materials. He has extensive laboratory testing and field monitoring experience, with current field research sites in the Theban Necropolis of Egypt and the BedrettoLab in Switzerland. He uses many different sensors to monitor both surface and near-surface underground structures to make correlations between environmental fluctuations and crack growth. He uses this monitoring data to calibrate numerical and machine learning models to make predictions of future behaviour. He works closely with a transdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geochemists, engineers, and data scientists to quantify the impact of varying climate on crack growth in brittle geomaterials.