Distinguished Professor Buddhima Indraratna is a civil engineering graduate from Imperial College, London, and obtained his PhD from the University of Alberta in 1987. He has worked in industry in several countries before becoming an academic and has been a United Nations expert and a foreign advisor to numerous overseas projects. Prof. Indraratna's pioneering contributions to railway geotechnology and various aspects of geotechnical engineering have been acknowledged through many national and international awards, including the 1st Ralph Proctor Lecture and 4th Louis Menard Lecture of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, ISSMGE, 2015 Thomas Telford Premium Award for Ground Improvement (ICE, UK), 2009 EH Davis Memorial Lecture of Australian Geomechanics Society, and 2017 Outstanding Contributions Medal of International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geotechnics, IACMAG, for his substantial and sustained contributions to Transport Geotechnics and Ground Improvement. Nationally, he was awarded the Engineers Australia Transport Medal in 2011, and more recently, the State Minister of Transport honored him with the 2015 Australasian Railway Technical Society's Outstanding Individual Award at the NSW Parliament. His pioneering contributions to railway engineering and ground improvement earned him the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE) in 2011. Prof Indraratna is the Founding Director of Australian Research Council funded Industrial Transformation Training Centre, ITTC-Rail, and formerly Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at University of Wollongong. Currently, he is Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of Transport Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Dr. Ana Heitor is a graduate from New University of Lisbon and obtained her master's and PhD degrees from Kyoto University (Japan) and the University of Wollongong (Australia), respectively. Having worked as a successful researcher and academic at the University of Wollongong for nearly a decade, Dr. Heitor is currently a lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the behavior of compacted materials under unsaturated conditions. She is an associate editor of the ICE Environmental Geotechnics and Soils and Foundations. While she is still a young researcher, her research outcomes have been recognized by a number of national awards sponsored by the Australian Geomechanics and international awards, such as the 2017 John Carter Award and, more recently, the 2019 Winston Churchill Fellowship.
Associate Professor Jayan S. Vinod obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His research focuses on the numerical modeling of granular materials and soil dynamics, earthquake engineering and ground improvement techniques for rails and mine tailings. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering (ASCE) and one of the editors-in-chief of International Journal of Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering (IGI-Global: USA). He is a member of the Technical Committee (TC105: Geo-mechanics) of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). He has received the 2019 Australia-India (Early Mid-Career Fellowship) EMCR fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science. He has also delivered many keynote addresses and invited presentations and is actively involved in the Australian Research Council (ARC) and Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) on various research projects on ground improvement, railway geotechnics and mine tailings.
