Cardiff University is one of the elite Russell group of UK research intensive universities. The School of Engineering is one of the largest schools within the university and in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) was ranked 1st in the UK for Civil Engineering. The M4L research group, which is contributing to the SMARTINCS network, has a long track record of research on construction materials and on developing numerical models that describe their behaviour.

Cardiff has extensive facilities for making and testing self-healing cementitious materials. This includes a dedicated concrete lab, a large range of standard and specialised testing rigs, including rigs with built-in environmental chambers and a specialised set of material characterisation laboratories. Cardiff School of Engineering has ample space to accommodate PhD and post-doc researchers in well-appointed rooms and well-developed computing systems including state-of-the-art parallel computing facilities.

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/research/explore/research-units/materials-for-life