BRIGHT SPARKS LECTURE - 5TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON UNSATURATED SOILS (EUNSAT 2025), LISBON, PORTUGAL
The YMPG in collaboration with the Organising Committee for 5th European Conference on Unsaturated Soils (EUNSAT 2025) in Portugal would like to announce the winners of the Bright Spark Lecture Award to two distinguished young geotechnical engineers/academics listed below. They were invited to give keynote lectures on 1-3 September 2025.
Alessandro Fraccica, Technologist, ISPRA - Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Soil-vegetation hydro-mechanical behaviour: experimental evidence and implications for landslide cases "
Ana Sofia Dias, Geotechnical Engineer, Mott MacDonald, Ldt
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Evolution of soil-water retention curves in slopes"
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
Alessandro Fraccica
Dr. Fraccica is a geotechnical engineer and technologist at the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). He was a Marie Skodowska-Curie Early-Stage Research Fellow, in a co-supervised PhD programme between the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) and the Université de Montpellier (France). During his PhD work he explored the experimental hydro-mechanical behaviour of vegetated soils and its implications for landslide cases. He continued his research career working on soil mixing and permeation grouting with sustainable binders. He was also involved into experimental and numerical research linked to gas transport through granular bentonite and sand-bentonite materials, related to a geological nuclear waste disposal case.
His works have been published in top-tier journals such as Géotechnique and the Canadian Geotechnical Journal and earned him the Soriano Prize for the best Spanish PhD thesis in geotechnical engineering from the Spanish Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering and the selection as a young representative of the Italian Geotechnical Association at the 29th European Young Geotechnical Engineers Conference.
Beyond his academic achievements, he collaborates with universities, mentors doctoral research, and contributes to international conferences and editorial initiatives. At ISPRA, he applies his expertise in the field of soil mechanics to environmental impact assessments, geohazard characterization, monitoring and mitigation.
Ana Sofia Dias
Dr Ana Sofia Dias obtained her Integrated MSc Degree in Civil Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal), where she was first introduced to the field of unsaturated soils. She continued to pursue this field during her PhD studies, where she investigated the use of vegetation to stabilize slopes susceptible to rainfall-induced landslides. In doing so, she studied how roots influenced the soil-water retention curve (SWRC) and the groundwater regime of a natural slope with vegetation present at a test site in Italy. Her PhD was awarded in cotutelle between the University of Naples Federico II (Italy) and the University of Montpellier (France), as part of the TERRE Marie Skodowska-Curie ITN-ETN project.
She continued her academic career as a postdoc at Durham University (UK), investigating weather-driven deterioration of long linear transport assets developed under the ACHILLES grant (funded by EPSRC). Her research focused on quantifying the effect of weather cycles on the evolution of the properties of compacted high plasticity London Clay, including SWRCs, permeability, fabric, and strength properties.
Currently, she is a Geotechnical Engineer at Mott MacDonald (UK), working within the Water and En-vironment Geotechnical team, where she contributes to projects involving dams, reservoirs, and flood defences.
