About Me
I was born in Sydney, Australia in 1992, and after a fairly uneventful childhood growing up on the upper North Shore, entered North Sydney Boys High School in 2005. I graduated with my Higher School Certificate from there in 2010, and went on to study civil engineering at the University of Sydney. During my time as an undergraduate, I was financed by a scholarship issued by the then Roads and Maritime Services of the New South Wales state government, in exchange for which I did three (rather than the standard one) internships over my summer breaks. During these internships I worked on material behaviour research (2011–2012), developer liaison for large private projects (2012–2013) and project management on the large public works project Northern Beaches Hospital Connectivity and Network Enhancement (2013–2014). That’s about the extent of my engagement with the engineering industry (to this point in time!). I finished my bachelors degree with first class honours and the University Medal, writing the honours thesis The Contribution of Granular Rotation to Improving the Efficiency of Heat Transfer, supervised by Professor Itai Einav.
After having taken a brief break, I started my PhD thesis in mid-2015, this time as a cotutelle degree between the University of Sydney and École nationale des ponts et chaussées, once again supervised by Itai, but also by Professeur Jean Sulem and (then doctor, now Professeur) Ioannis Stefanou (now at École centrale de Nantes). My thesis was entitled The effect of evolving micro-structural length scale on the macroscopic constitutive behaviour of granular media, and was essentially about developing and implementing a model to predict the formation of structures, referred to as shear bands, within material like sands. These structures occur in a wide variety of materials, but developing a good model for sands was particularly difficult owing to the tendency of the grains to break, which rather complicated the previous models. Nevertheless, we got something worthwhile out, and I defended the thesis on the 22nd of November, 2019 (although the University of Sydney would only recognise its completion several months later, mostly due to administrative delays connected with a certain well-known virus).
Following a delay due to said well-known virus, I started a postdoc in the TRIPOP team at the Centre Inria de l’Université Grenoble Alpes (it was called something different at the time, but French institutions feel a need to change their names frequently). During this postdoc, I was supervised by Vincent Acary and Franck Bourrier, working on the topic of nonsmooth cohesive zone modelling for fracture in brittle materials like rocks or concrete. This postdoc was financed by the Region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes through project SMART-PROTECT, and was carried out as a collaboration between Inria, Inrae, Géolithe and Myotis. This postdoc finished at the end of August 2022, and was followed in September 2022 with a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Individual Fellowship, still in TRIPOP, still working with Vincent and Franck, but also with Professor Johan Gaume of WSL/SLF and ETH Zürich. My project, Landslide and avalanchE Mechanics with Multiphysical datA (LEMMA) grouped together all the techniques I learned over my career to that point (bulk soil modelling, nonsmooth crack modelling) with some new ones (data-driven mechanics, the material point method), to try and get to grip with large alpine mass movements caused by climate change. This project finished at the end of October 2024.
From the start of November 2024, I have returned to the École nationale des ponts et chaussées as a postdoc, once again working with Professeur Jean Sulem, on the modelling of seismic faults with the Cosserat continuum.
