I read Engineering at Magdalene College Cambridge, specialising in Civil Engineering and receiving an MEng degree in 2003. I then remained in Cambridge where I completed a PhD in earthquake-resistant foundation design in 2007, work which was subsequently incorporated into the book Design of Piled Foundations in Liquefiable Soils, for engineering practitioners undertaking foundation design in seismic regions.

I subsequently built my career at the University of Dundee over a period of 19 years, including seven years as Professor of Civil Engineering, adding new strands of research in the design of infrastructure for a range of challenging environments including (deep) underground, on the sea floor and even on Mars! I joined Brasenose in 2026 as a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science and Professor of Engineering Science at the Department of Engineering Science.  I am a Chartered Civil Engineer and Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

My main area of teaching is in Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (in the later years of the MEng Engineering Science) and I have been the principal author of the widely-used text book Craig’s Soil Mechanics since the 8th Edition in 2012. I also teach in structural mechanics, materials and dynamics in the initial years of the MEng programme.

I work across a range of areas that can broadly be summarised as innovative design against extreme dynamic environmental actions.  This includes:

(1) Nature-based approaches for resilience against extreme weather

This work seeks to develop nature-based (e.g. vegetation) or nature-inspired (biomimetic) alternatives to conventional ground engineering approaches which are typically based on the use of concrete and/or steel. An example is the planting of vegetation to prevent landsliding in cuttings and embankments next to railway lines due to heavy rainfall (which is becoming more extreme due to Climate Change) and thereby extend the design life of the UK’s ageing infrastructure.  By directly using, or learning from, nature, a variety of benefits can be achieved in engineering design, including reduced embodied carbon, reduced cost, increased resilience to Climate Change and biodiversity enhancement.

(2) Geotechnical Engineering supporting energy decarbonisation

In this area, my work supports the practical implementation of cleaner energy systems, through: (i) the development of innovative anchorage systems for offshore renewable energy systems (e.g. offshore wind) and methods for their practical design; and (ii) development of approaches for the robust geotechnical design of shallow geothermal energy systems (e.g. energy piles, diaphragm walls and tunnels, used with ground source heat pumps or district energy systems).

(3) Safer urban areas in earthquake-prone regions

The focus of my work in this area is to understand how infrastructure systems (e.g. tunnel systems for underground urban transit systems) and building structures perform in response to earthquake over (and beyond!) their design life, particularly when they are interacting with each other in dense urban areas. This includes the development of practical multi-scale methods for considering global interaction effects over large areas on local structural performance which can also track the evolution/degradation of the system across sequences of earthquakes (e.g. the cumulative effects of pre-shocks and after-shocks).