Double prize win for College's newest Fellow in engineering

Dr Brian Sheil recently won The Crampton Prize and the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering - Europe Bright Spark Lecture Award.

Dr Sheil is a world-leading researcher in construction engineering, focusing on optimising the efficiency and safety of civil infrastructure construction.

He won the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) prestigious Crampton Prize for his paper ‘Monitoring the construction of a large-diameter caisson in sand’, co-authored with industry partner Ward and Burke.

The paper appeared in ICE Journal Geotechnical Engineering (Volume 175 Issue 3) in June 2022 and described the instrumentation and monitoring of a large-diameter caisson on a UK construction site. The caisson was instrumented to measure settlement and tilt, soil–structure interaction contact stresses and structural performance. The monitored data revealed the occurrence of complex soil–structure interactions during sinking that are not readily captured by existing prescriptive design approaches. This case history provides valuable information for developing an improved basis for design and an important frame of reference for future monitoring projects.

The Crampton Prize is awarded annually to papers of exceptional quality and benefit to civil engineering, construction and materials science. This year, the award ceremony will be held in October at the Institution of Civil Engineers, in London.

Dr Sheil has also been selected to receive the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE) Europe Bright Spark Lecture Award. The award will be presented during the 4th International Symposium Machine Learning & Big Data in Geoscience at University College Cork, 29 August – 1 September 2023, where Brian will give a special lecture session about machine learning for underground construction.

The ISSMGE is the pre-eminent professional body representing the interests and activities of engineers, academics and contractors worldwide that actively participate in geotechnical engineering. The ISSMGE provides a focus for professional leadership to some 90 Member Societies and around 20,000 individual members.

The Bright Spark Lecture award was created to promote young geotechnical researchers of ISSMGE to play a significant role in various international and regional conferences, with the opportunity to deliver keynote lectures.

This is based on an article originally published by the University of Cambridge's Department for Engineering. It is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.