BRIGHT SPARKS LECTURES - International Symposium on Energy Geotechnics (SEG23), Delft, Netherlands
The YMPG in collaboration with the Organising Committee for the International Symposium on Energy Geotechnics (SEG23), Delft, Netherlands would like to announce the winners of the Bright Spark Lecture Award to threr distinguished young geotechnical engineers/academics: Benjamin Cerfontaine and Melis Sutman. They were invited to give keynote lectures on 3-5 October 2023.
Dr Benjamin Cerfontaine, Lecturer, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Earth, Wind and Fire: Developing new silent foundations for offshore wind turbines, a Bright Spark lecture"
Dr Melis Sutman, Assistant Professor, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Cross-scale investigation of the ground-energy geostructure interplay: From in-situ to laboratory testing"
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
Benjamin Cerfontaine
Dr Benjamin Cerfontaine studied and undertook his PhD at the University of Liège in Belgium, which he obtained in 2014. He then moved to the University of Dundee with a Marie-Curie individual fellowship in 2017 and joined the University of Southampton as a lecturer in geotechnical engineering in 2020. His research work focuses on geotechnical solutions to support renewable energy development. The bulk of his work to date has been on sustainable foundations for offshore wind turbines, either floating or bottom-fixed, such as screw piles, suction piles, or clusters of jacked piles. He is continuing in this direction at the University of Southampton, with several projects on anchors for floating wind, such as shared anchors. His research rationale has always been to uncover the fundamental physical mechanisms that drive the macroscopic behaviour of a foundation or geo-structure. To achieve this goal, he uses a combination of advanced numerical and/or physical modelling techniques such as finite elements, advanced constitutive models, DEM, and centrifuge modelling. Benjamin loves hillwalking, particularly in Scotland, reading non-scientific books, and playing badminton. He is active on LinkedIn, and provides regular updates.
Melis Sutman
Dr Melis Sutman is an Assistant Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University since August 2019. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratory of Soil Mechanics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (2016 2019). She holds PhD (2016) and MSc (2012) degrees in Geotechnical Engineering from Virginia Tech, USA. Her research focuses on how geostructures can contribute to the sustainability of human activities and resilience to future climatic and energy-related challenges, which is currently funded by the Royal Society, the Knowledge Transfer Partnership, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Melis is a member of Energy Geotechnics Technical Committee (TC308) of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE), Cost Action CA21156 (FOLIAGE), International Energy Agency Working Group on Geothermal Heating and Cooling, as well as Womens Engineering Society. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment. Her PhD research, funded by National Science Foundation (US NSF), received several awards by USUCGER, Geo-Institute and ADSC. Her postdoctoral research was funded by Swiss NSF. For her contributions at EPFL, she was awarded Recognition for Exceptional Services.
