Team

Ignacio Escuder Bueno

Founding partner
iescuder@hma.upv.es

Ignacio Escuder Bueno has his doctorate’s degree in Civil Engineering (PhD, CE) from Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV, Spain) and a Master’s of Science in Civil Engineering (MSc) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). Since 1996 he is Profesional Engineer (PE) as member of the Spanish Institution of Civil Engineers (CICCP).

He is full professor in Hydraulic works at UPV and founding partner of iPresas (a technology-based SPIN-OFF company from UPV founded in 2011). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Maryland (USA, 2014), at Utah State University (USA, 2006) and teaching assistant at University of Wisconsin-Milwakee (USA, 1995-1996).

Since 1996 he works as a consultant and has carried out work on an international scale related to dam safety studies, behavior modeling or risk analysis of hundreds of dams (hydroelectric, supply, irrigation, etc.) among which we can mention the large dams of the Lower Caroní in Venezuela, the Drini river in Albania, the Cerros Colorados system in Argentina, the large hydropower dams of Porce in Colombia, or the Chira-Soria complex in Gran Canaria (Spain).

Since 2015, he supports the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in the implementation of its disaster risk management and climate change adaptation policy for civil infrastructure projects. He regularly works as a consultant for the design of natural risk governance strategies, critical infrastructure and dam safety for private operators, government agencies and other multilateral organizations such as the World Bank (WB) or the Andean Development Corporation (CAF-Development Bank of Latin America).

Since 2016 he is member of the Independent Expert Panel of reviewers for the dam safety program of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). He has been Team Leader of the World Bank DRIP project (Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Project; WB) for the Central Water Commission (CWC) of the Government of India (2018 and 2020) and member of the External Panel of reviewers of the Condor Cliff dam project in Argentina (2019-2021).

Since 2021, he coordinates the implementation of risk governance and climate change adaptation of federal-owned dams in Spain for the General Directorate of Water of the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITERD) and he has been an advisor in different projects for the implementation of risk analysis in dam safety management (for the Argentine Regulatory Agency for Dam Safety (ORSEP) and for Tenaga Nasional Berhard (TNB) in Malaysia, among others).

He is author or co-author of more than 150 publications, and he has lectured in over 30 conferences hosted in several countries. Among others, he has been coordinator of the SPANCOLD Technical Guide N.8., T.1 “Risk analysis applied to the safety management of dams and reservoirs (2012)”, co-author of the ICOLD Bulletin 155 “Guidelines for use of numerical models in dam Engineering” (2011) and has led the team that developed the Guide for the evaluation and management of risks associated with dams of the CWC of India (2019). He is co-developer of the iPresas software for dam safety risk analysis and management.

He has been Principal Investigator of multiple research projects on dam safety and flood risk management and has also been an organizer of international forums and conferences on the subject-matter (for example, the International Week on Risk Analysis, Dam Safety, Dam Security and Critical Infrastructure held in Valencia 2005, 2008 and 2011 or the International Symposium on Dam Safety held in Gran Canaria in 2021).