Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering

Professor Radhey S. Sharma Wins Top Award

Radhey S. Sharma, assistant professor of geotechnical engineering, has been awarded the top civil engineering award "Telford Medal" by the Institute of Civil Engineers.

He has won the honor for his paper "Coupling of hydraulic hysteresis and stress-strain behavior in unsaturated soils," which presents a new theoretical framework for understanding and modeling the mechanical and hydraulic behavior of unsaturated soils.

The new framework is able to explain and model a number of aspects of the mechanical behavior of unsaturated soils that could not be represented by existing theoretical models. This could have important implications for the analysis and design of a wide variety of geotechnical works involving unsaturated natural soils or compacted fills.

The paper was co-authored with Simon J. Wheeler and Marc Buisson. The paper was published in the prestigious journal Geotechnique.

Sharma is an international expert in unsaturated soils; his work has direct relevance to the U.S. climatic conditions. Poor understanding of unsaturated soils behavior results in damage of billions of dollars annually through the failure of foundations and highway embankments and landslides.

Sharma has a doctorate in geotechnical engineering from the University of Oxford. He has seven years experience as faculty and nine years in industry. He is serving on the editorial boards of the prestigious journals of American Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and the international journal of Geotechnical and Geological Engineering. He is serving on the top international committee on unsaturated soil (TC6) of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering.

Sharma is scheduled to give a keynote presentation on unsaturated soils behavior and its applications at the Indian Geotechnical Conference at Warrangal, Andhra Pradesh, India, in December 2004.