Prof. Hadi Khabbaz has conducted original research in ground modification, unsaturated soil mechanics, tunnelling and transport geotechnics. He has been involved in design of civil infrastructure and soil behaviour modelling research for over 20 years. His research has been focused on the theoretical and numerical analysis of problematic soils, underground spaces, granular particles and unsaturated porous media with strong applications to real life engineering problems. He has made several significant contributions in the field of unsaturated soil mechanics and ground improvement techniques with fundamental and pioneering nature. His early work on unsaturated soil mechanics has been increasingly cited in literature and considered as a significant contribution to the field. He has sound numerical, experimental and programming skills. His research output and publications on geotechnical aspects of rail track foundations overlying soft soil is also extensive. To date, 17 research students completed their theses under his supervision and he has 16 completions as a cosupervisor. At present, he is the principal supervisor of 5 research students. He is an active assessor of the ARC and the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) grants. He is a technical reviewer of many international journals and several research organisations.Dr. Cholachat Rujikiatkamjorn is a Professor at the Transport Research Centre, School of Civil, and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineeering and Information Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His key areas of expertise include ground improvement for transport infrastructure and soft soil engineering. He has published over 270 articles in international journals and conferences. While maintaining a strong focus on quality teaching, to date, he has secured over $2 million in research funding, mostly from external sources. He is currently a CI of one ARC-DP project, 3 ARC-LP projects, an ITTC Rail and a CRC-Rail project. He is currently the supervisor/co-supervisor of 10 HDR students and 4 Research Associates. His research achievements over the years and involvement in Port of Brisbane reclamation were the main driving force in the introduction of new Australian Standards (AS8700) on Vertical Drains in Soft Soils.Dr. Ali Parsa is an Associate Geotechnical Engineer with more than 18 years of experience. After 6 years of industry experience, he joined University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2009 & worked on an industry (i.e. Menard) sponsored project incorporated different aspects of soft soil improvement. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2014, Dr. Parsa re-joined industry and since then have worked in infrastructure and construction sectors and had involvement in delivery of more than 150 projects including major infrastructure projects. In last several years, he has collaborated with leading multidisciplinary companies, many engineers from other design disciplines,variety of clients/authorities and major joint ventures in Australia. He has also been involved with several R&D programs and development of new approaches to deliver efficient & robust designs for challenging geotechnical problems. Dr. Parsa is the elected Chair of AGS Sydney Chapter. He is coordinator of AGS Sydney Chapter annual Symposium and editor of proceedings since 2017. Ali also represents Australia in two technical committees of International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE), TC103 (Numerical Methods) and TC207 (Soil-Structure Interaction).
