DrBob or Facundo Varela

I started my journey learning about corrosion as a student of Jose Galvele back in Argentina. In 2008 I spend 6 months working with Bruce Hinton, Maria Forsyth and Nick Birbilis at Monash University as part of my bachelor’s dissertation and I fell in love with the land down under. In 2012 I went back to Australia for my PhD at Deakin University. My PhD project focused on gaining a better understanding of corrosion under disbonded coatings and to develop new electrochemical methods for monitoring it. Later, as a research fellow I further validated the sensors develop during my PhD deploying them in several live pipelines and further developed them into commercially viable products. 

Currently my research interests include developing closed control loops for cathodic protection, developing test to evaluate coating degradation in water, developing low cost repair methods for disbonded field joints and verifying the suitability of pipeline coatings for transportation of Hydrogen.