Welcome Mareike Thiedeitz

Mareike is a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in supplementary cementitious materials, with a strong focus on multidisciplinary research and international collaborations.

After studying civil engineering in Lübeck, Germany, she earned her PhD at the Centre for Building Materials at Technical University Munich, where she investigated the transient flow of thixotropic cementitious pastes through mathematical modeling and Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Over the past years, she co-organized several interdisciplinary and international research and student projects in the field of sustainable building, mainly in collaboration with partners in Tanzania, Ghana and Turkey. She is co-founder of the German-based non-governmental organization “Step Forward together e.V.”, which is a support organization for NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa engaging for girls and women’s rights.

Mareike joined ETH Zurich’s Chair for Building Materials in April 2024 to research biochar in concrete. At the Chair for Sustainable Construction, she continues investigating biochar from microscale interactions in cementitious systems towards more lifecycle assessments. After a teaching stay in Tanzania in May, she will begin her ETH-postdoctoral fellowship on the performance assessment of agricultural waste ashes, emphasizing their application in emerging economies. Her approach combines physics-informed neural networks for performance prediction with a shift from capital-intensive material analysis to practical, decentralized methods, empowering local resource management.