BRIGHT SPARKS LECTURES - 10th Asian Young Geotechnical Engineers Conference (AYGEC), Jakarta, Indonesia
The YMPG in collaboration with the Organising Committee for the 10th Asian Young Geotechnical Engineers Conference (AYGEC) in Indonesia would like to announce the winners of the Bright Spark Lecture Award to four distinguished young geotechnical engineers/academics listed below. They were invited to give keynote lectures on 11-14 November 2024.
Dr. Itsuki Sato, Researcher, National Research and Development Agency and collaborative researcher, University of Tokyo, Japan
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Effect of Particle Crushing and Porosity of Volcanic Pumice on the Location of Critical State Line"
Dr Ying Lai, Assistant Professor, Zhejiang University, China
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Experimental Investigation of Piggy-Backed Anchors In Cohesive And Cohesionless Soil"
Dr Qing Cheng, Associate Professor, Nanjing University
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Tension healing mechanism of desiccation cracks in a clayey soil"
Dr Eomzi Yang, Postdoctoral researcher, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Pore-scale investigation of hydraulic behaviors during microbially induced carbonate precipitation"
The Bright Spark Lecture Award was established to promote young members of the ISSMGE to play a major role in various international and regional conferences. Recipients of this award are invited to give a keynote lecture at ISSMGE conferences. All Technical Committee conference organisers and Member Society conference organisers are encouraged to select Bright Spark Lecturers at their conferences. Details regarding the award can be found on the ISSMGE website: https://www.issmge.org/the-society/awards/bright-spark-lecture-award.
We invite everyone, especially young geotechnical engineers, to come and enjoy the lectures. We hope these lectures can inspire and motivate us further to excel in our beloved field, geotechnical engineering.
Winners Bio
Itsuki Sato
Dr. Itsuki Sato is a researcher at the Soil Stabilization Group, Port and Airport Research Institute (PARI), National Research and Development Agency, Japan, and a collaborative researcher at the University of Tokyo. He holds a Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Tokyo, where he also completed his undergraduate and master's studies. Specializing in the critical state and constitutive model of crushable porous granular materials, he has led impactful research projects since joining PARI in 2022. His projects include evaluating the bearing capacity of DM quay walls and studying the seawater degradation of cement-treated soils. His current research involves the use of crushable stone materials in ports, aimed at improving both national standards and global geotechnical practices. Originally from Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, Dr. Sato enjoys soccer, karaoke, and board games in his leisure time.
Ying Lai
Ying Lai is an Assistant Professor of College of Civil Engineering and Architecture at Zhejiang University, China. She earned her B.S. degree from Iowa State University in the United States in 2011, and pursued both her M.S. (2013) and Ph.D. (2017) at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Professor Robert B. Gilbert. After completing her doctoral studies, Dr. Lai joined Zhejiang University as a post-doc researcher and now serves as an Assistant Professor.
One of Dr. Lais most notable achievements during her time at UT Austin was the development of a six degree-of-freedom tracking technique for geotechnical testing. This innovative work earned her Hogentogler Award for the Annual Best Paper from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Committee D18 on Soil and Rock. Dr. Lais research focuses on offshore anchors and soil-anchor interactions. She has further advanced the six-degree-of-freedom tracking technique by applying it to centrifuge tests, greatly enhancing our understanding of anchor behavior in soil. Her work has led to the optimization of novel anchor configurations, including the Flying Wing Anchor®, piggy-backed anchors, and shared line anchors.
Qing Cheng
Dr. Qing Cheng is now an Associate Professor at Nanjing University. She received her Bachelors degree from Hohai University in 2014 and completed her Ph.D. at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. C.W.W. Ng. She joined Nanjing University in 2018 as an Assistant Researcher and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021.
Dr. Qing Cheng focuses her research on the deformation response of unsaturated soils under extreme climatic conditions and ecological regulation. She has published over 60 SCI-indexed papers, with 34 as the first or corresponding author. Her achievements have earned her several prestigious awards in China, such as the First Prize of Natural Science Award by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (2022), and Gu Dezheng Youth Award (2024). She has been selected for the Young Elite Scientist Sponsorship Program by cast. Internationally, Dr Cheng also received the First runner up of Hsai-Yang Fang Best Paper Award (2023) and Best Paper Award from Engineering Geology. She currently serves as Secretary of the International Society of Environmental Geotechnology.
Eomzi Yang
Dr. Eomzi Yang earned her bachelor's degree in civil engineering, and completed her Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Yonsei University in 2022. During her studies in Yonsei University as Ph.D. student, she conducted research about Image-based characterization of hydraulic properties of geomaterials including sandstone, limestone, carbonate rocks, weathered rock and soils. She refined her ability to perform virtual experimentation using the X-ray CT images of heterogenous soils and rocks. Especially, she focused on maximizing the effective utilization of information in X-ray CT images with less assumptions and any other experiments to enhance the readiness of image-based characterization for unskilled users.
In 2023, she joined Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology as Postdoctoral researcher. Based on her experiences related to numerical simulations, image processing and different open-source software, she is attempting to get wider her research topics into automation in geotechnical engineering related to document understandings. She recently developed intelligent geotechnical document processing methodology using natural language processing and artificial intelligence for recent issues on the ununified documentation in engineering companies in Republic of Korea.
