Bright Sparks Lectures - National Workshop on Transportation Geomechanics and Ground Improvement in Sydney, Australia

Bright Sparks Lectures - National Workshop on Transportation Geomechanics and Ground Improvement in Sydney, Australia

The YMPG in collaboration with the Organising Committee for the National Workshop on Transportation Geomechanics and Ground Improvement in Sydney, Australia would like to announce the winners of the Bright Spark Lecture Award to two distinguished young geotechnical engineers: Dr. Kil-Wan Ko and Dr. Orestis Adamidis. They are both invited to give keynote lectures on 3 June 2022.

  1. Dr Rakesh Malisetty, Research Fellow, Transportation Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia.
    Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Role of train speed in track design and its effects on ballast performance"
  2. Liuxin Chen, PhD Student, Monash University, Australia.
    Bright Spark Lecture Title: "Integrated simulation of variable cyclic loading in road construction and operation"

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

 

Dr. Rakesh Malisetty

Dr. Rakesh Sai Malisetty completed his PhD in geotechnical engineering from the University of Wollongong (UOW) in 2020 and his bachelors degree in civil engineering with honours from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2014. Rakeshs research is focussed on computational modelling of granular materials in railway infrastructure with strong application to future challenges of high speed and heavy haul trains. He investigated the dynamic response of ballasted railway tracks under heavy haul railway loads using analytical models and assessed the impacts on ballast deformation and track stability. He was instrumental in developing a new constitutive model for ballast capturing 3-dimensional dynamic stress conditions such as principal stress rotation and stress amplification using multilaminate framework. His innovative research has been published as top journal articles and presented in various international conferences. He was awarded the AGS NSW Outstanding Research award 2021, the Young Geotechnical Professional at ISGTI, New Delhi in 2018 for his contributions to Transportation Geotechnics. Rakesh is currently working as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Fellow in Transport Research Centre at UTS examining the influence of railway loads on jointed rock formations and exploring the usefulness of field data in developing predictive maintenance techniques for railway tracks.

 

Liuxin Chen

Ms Liuxin Chen is a PhD scholar at ARC ITRH SPARC Hub, Department of Civil Engineering, Monash University. She received her B.S. degree in Civil Engineering in 2016 and M.Sc. degree in Geotechnical Engineering in 2019 from Central South University (CSU), China. During her Master's studies at CSU, she was competitively selected by CSU to receive funding support for her to visit Aston University, UK in 2018. In 2019, as a recipient of the Graduate Scholarship, Departmental Top-up Scholarship and International Tuition Scholarship from Monash University, she commenced her PhD at SPARC Hub, Monash University under the supervision of Prof Jayantha Kodikara, Dr Javad Ghorbani and Prof Chunshun Zhang (ex-supervisor). Her research mainly focuses on developing state-of-the-art numerical and theoretical approaches to predict the consequences of soil-climate interactions and provide potential treatments for infrastructure deterioration. The contributions of her research have been to the fields of unsaturated soil dynamics, plasticity and finite element analysis. Over the past years, her research provides a deeper insight into how critical infrastructures, such as roadways, respond to environmental loads (e.g., wetting and drying) and external loads (e.g., traffic loads). Her research aims to advance innovation in testing methods, design and construction of more resilient geotechnical structures which rest on unsaturated soils. So far, Ms Chen has published more than ten high-quality papers and delivered several oral presentations on these topics at leading international conferences in geomechanics. In 2021, she won the Best Speaker Award at the First Engineering Postgraduate Conference, Australia because of her exceptional oral presentation. With her outstanding contribution to geotechnical engineering, she received the ISSMGE Bright Spark lecture award to deliver an invited lecture at UTS-TRC Workshop on Transportation Geotechnology and Ground Improvement, 2022.