Keynotes > Keynotes Speakers

Béatrice Baudet, University College London (UK)

Title: Critical state soil mechanics: a pore-based perspective

Béatrice Baudet is professor of soil mechanics at University College London. She received her PhD in 2001 from City University London, after completing a MSc in geotechnical engineering at the University of Glasgow (1997) and an undergraduate engineering degree from the Ecole Spéciale des Travaux Publics (Paris, 1997). She joined University College London as a lecturer in 2001, which she left in 2010 to work at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) for six years, then she came back to UCL in 2016. Her research career started as a constitutive modeller of natural clays, then at UCL she developed expertise in laboratory characterisation of soils including time effects, soil reinforcement and granular soil mechanics. While at HKU, she started exploring soils at the microscale, noticeably the characterisation of sand grain surface roughness and its change during loading, work which was awarded the 2021 British Geotechnical Association medal. She is continuing research on the microstructure and micromechanics of soils at UCL, applied to ballast, sands and clays. Béatrice is currently associate editor of the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. She served two terms on the Géotechnique journal advisory panel and was part of the Géotechnique Letters journal founding panel, for which she acted as its deputy chair (2013-2016). She has been associate editor of the journal Geotextiles and Geomembranes, and on the editorial boards of Environmental Geotechnics and the Indian Geotechnical Journal. As well as authoring over 40 journal papers, she is an active reviewer for many international journals and for the European Science Foundation College, and is a member of the Belgian research grants panel FWO on science and technology of constructions and the built environment.

Giuseppe Buscarnera, Northwestern University (USA)

Title: The shape of sand: using discrete and continuum models to explain how granular materials adapt under stress

Giuseppe Buscarnera is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, and a Ph.D. in Geomechanics from the Politecnico di Torino. His research focuses on the mechanics of soils and soft rocks, landslide geomechanics, granular materials, and the multi-physics of subsurface systems. He is the PI of numerous research projects on these topics and has served as Chair of the Poromechanics and Modeling Inelasticity and Multiscale Behavior committees of the Engineering Mechanics Institute of ASCE. His research has been awarded with the Faculty Early Career Award of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Arthur Casagrande Award of ASCE. 

Ryan Hurley, Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Title: Granular Mechanics Across Time and Length Scales: Insights from Quasi-Static and Dynamic Testing with In-Situ X-ray Measurements

Ryan Hurley is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with a secondary appointment in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, and a Faculty Fellow of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Before joining JHU in 2018, Ryan received his Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from Caltech and worked as a postdoc in computational geomechanics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ryan has received a 2017 Department of Energy’s Secretary’s Appreciation Award, a 2020 NSF CAREER Award, a 2021 Army Education Outreach Program’s Mentor of the Year Award, and a 2022 Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program Award. He is a founding editor of Open Geomechanics and was the sole editor of the 2023-2024 iMechanica Journal Club. Ryan’s research interests include studying the deformation and failure mechanisms of granular materials, rocks, and concrete using advanced experimental techniques, such as in-situ x-ray imaging and diffraction, constitutive modeling of soils and rocks and high pressures, and micromechanics.

Katerina Ioannidou, Université de Montpellier (France)

Title: Molecular and coarse-grain modelling of geomaterials

Katerina Ioannidou is a CNRS research scientist at the Laboratory of Mechanics and Civil Engineering in the University of Montpellier, France. She received her undergraduate degree in Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece and her PhD in Science from the Department of Civil Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich in 2014. Before joining  CNRS, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is a scientist in the field of Materials Science and Engineering with a strong interest in the Physics and Mechanics of porous materials with an emphasis particular on artificial or natural multi-scale materials and the link between the texture of these materials and their mechanical and durability properties. As part of her research, simulation methods from the soft matter or granular physics are combined with 3d imaging experiments and mechanical characterization from the nanometric scale in order to understand the fundamental processes that drive the performance of multi-scale porous materials, and to enable the scientific engineering of new multifunctional materials. 

Cristina Jommi, Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)

Title: Fibres in soils: linking multiscale experimental and numerical approaches

Cristina Jommi is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and she holds the Chair of Dykes and Embankments at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She got her PhD from Politecnico di Milano in 1992, where she remained as assistant and associate professor until 2012. She became Professor of Dykes and Embankments at Delft University of Technology in 2013 and, since 2017, she is sharing this position with a professorship at Politecnico di Milano. Her research activity covers the multi-physics behaviour of geomaterials from the micro scale to the field scale, with combined theoretical, experimental and numerical approaches. She developed extensive research on the modelling of the micro-macro response of unsaturated soils, and on the fundamental nature of the mechanical behaviour of peats. Her main current research interests are the monotonic and cyclic response of soft organic soils, and the assessment, maintenance and sustainable reinforcement of water defence and transportation embankments. She is an active member of the Technical Committees TC 106 – Unsaturated Soils and TC214 – Soft Soils. She has co-authored more than 150 scientific publications in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering.

Zhen-Yu Yin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (China)

Title: Hydromechanical modelling of internal erosion in gap-graded granular soils

Zhen-Yu Yin is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He received his BEng in Civil Engineering from Zhejiang University in 1997, followed by five years engineering consultancy at the Zhejiang Jiahua Architecture Design Institute. Then, he obtained his MSc and PhD in Geotechnical Engineering at Ecole Centrale de Nantes (France) in 2003 and 2006 respectively. He was Maitre de Conferences at Ecole Centrale de Nantes before moving to Hong Kong.

Prof. Yin is currently Associate Committee Member of Granular Materials Committee of American Society of Civil Engineers; Associate Editor of “European Journal of Environmental and Civil Engineering” and “Geotechnique Letters”; and Editorial Board Members of some top journals in the field of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering (Canadian Geotechnical Journal, International Journal of Geomechanics ASCE, Computers and Geotechnics, Soils and Foundations, Acta Geotechnica, Transportation Geotechnics, GeoRisk, International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics etc.). His research interests include numerical modelling of soils from micro to macro, development of particle-based methods for multiphysics large deformation analysis in geotechnical engineering, model tests and advanced laboratory testing, and practice of machine learning in geotechnical engineering.