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Franco Zunino

Assistant Professor
Research Interests
Cement chemistry, Advanced characterization methods for cementitious materials, Low-carbon concrete, Supplementary cementitious materials, Calcined clay technology, LCA of cement-based materials
Contact
zunino@berkeley.edu
Office

725 Davis Hall

Office Hours

Fall 2025: M & W 3:30 - 4:30

SCiM Lab Website
ResearchGate
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LinkedIn
Zunino headshot

Franco Zunino is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on developing innovative, environmentally friendly cementitious materials through a fundamental scientific approach. His interests include advanced time-resolved characterization of cement hydration, surface–polymer interactions in cement pastes, microstructural analysis using electron microscopy, and the optimization of clinker and supplementary cementitious material production processes.

Dr. Zunino’s work has been recognized internationally. His doctoral thesis received the Nanocem 2020 Prize for the best Ph.D. thesis in cement and concrete science worldwide. In 2022, he was awarded the Wason Medal by the American Concrete Institute (ACI) for the most meritorious paper published in their journals in 2021. In 2023, he received the Colonnetti Medal from RILEM for his outstanding contributions to construction materials and structures.

He currently serves as Chair of the ACI 240.0A subcommittee on calcined clays and Workgroup 5 Lead of the ASTM C09.24 subcommittee on reactivity. He is also a member of the Educational Activities Committee (EAC) of RILEM and serves on the Editorial Board of Construction and Building Materials and RILEM Technical Letters.

Ultra-green concrete  (UGC)

The project aims at developing a new family of concretes (UGC: ultra-green concrete) to radically reduce the CO2 emissions related to this material, substantially beyond the CO2 savings of any of the technologies currently available. The project approaches the development of UGC with a novel and innovative two-fold strategy, moving the field of cement and concrete science far beyond its current state-of-the-art to achieve the ambitious carbon-reduction target:

1. Reduce the amount of clinker in cement substantially below 50%, maximizing the use of mineral additions such as calcined clay and limestone and others  through a fundamental understanding of reaction kinetics and hydrate precipitation that contributes to reduce porosity.
2. Reduce the amount of binder (hydrated paste) below 250 kg/m3 per cubic meter of concrete.

Limestone calcined clay cements (LC3)

LC3, blended cement produced by the combination of limestone, calcined clays and Portland cement provides a solution that achieves equivalent mechanical performance to OPC (Type I/II), better durability against chloride and ASR and a reduction of CO2 emissions by about 40%. Furthermore it is cost effective, and due to the similarities with OPC it is a material that can be adopted today using the same construction equipment and workforce worldwide. Among his contributions of Dr. Zunino to the LC3 technology, establishing a mechanism of sulfate requirement in blended cements and a detailed description of the microstructural development of LC3 can be considered landmarks of his work. Currently, Dr. Zunino remains active in the LC3 research team, actively participating in education and dissemination activities organized in different regions of the world.

Hydration and phase assemblage of Portland limestone cements (PLC)

Limestone, while mostly inert, provides excellent nucleation surfaces for the precipitation of hydrates, and in some cases may positively contribute to the workability of the material. Nowadays, these cements are more common than conventional Type I/II Portland cements. Furthermore, the widespread availability of limestone makes these cements ideal candidates for scaling up replacement of clinker beyond what is feasible with just limestone with other locally available materials. This is for example happening currently in the USA, switching from Type I/II  to almost exclusively Portland limestone cements (Type IL in ASTM C595), roughly saving 10% of CO2 relative to the previous situation where OPC was dominant.