About Alba Rodríguez Piedrabuena

Alba Rodríguez Piedrabuena is a geotechnical engineer specialising as a Researcher and Consultant in offshore energy projects within the Energy and Underground Infrastructure (EUI) department at Deltares.

She obtained her Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain (2020). She later hold a Master's degree in Geo-engineering from TU Delft (2024), with her research focused on "First Steps into the Calibration Chamber Pile Tests with Glauconitic Sands."

Her master's thesis contributed to a conference paper presented at the European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics in Delft and she was nominated for the Ingeokring best thesis award in Engineering Geology (2022– 2024). Alba has also co-authored several papers in ISFOG conference in Nantes, France, in 2025.

At Deltares, Alba plays a key technical role working on several offshore wind projects related to new technologies of installation and extraction of monopiles for bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine. For instance, Hydraulic Pile Extraction - Scaled Tests 1.2 (HyPE-ST 1.2), which investigates the decommissioning of monopiles through hydraulic extraction; the Silent Installation of MonoPiLEs (SIMPLE III), which explores a novel installation technique combining vibro technology with water jetting inside monopiles; and HybridLabs, in which a new impact hammer for the geocentrifuge is designed.

Her work also includes research on the behaviour of glauconite soils and their effects on offshore construction.

During her time at Deltares, Alba has been developing expertise in soil-structure interaction and in various modelling techniques, including physical (1g) scaled modelling and centrifuge modelling. Her work is significantly contributing to advancing geotechnical engineering practices in offshore environments related to Deltares moonshot “Energy transition and climate neutrality”.