Civil Engineering Research

Background

With supporting letters from Prof. Guy Houlsby and his former student, Prof. Giang D Nguyen, Dr Nguyen was given a special chance to carry out research in the geotechnics section at Imperial College London where is home to many leading figures, Sir Alec Skempton and Professor Alan Bishop. Dr Nguyen obtained a PhD degree and a DIC degree from Imperial College London, working under the supervision of Professor Catherine O'Sullivan. The title of this work is: "Micromechanics of shear wave propagation and non-linear stiffness of granular materials". The thesis was examined by Prof. Jamie Standing (Imperial College London) and Prof. Matthew Coop (University College London). This study was sponsored by a Vied-Newton PhD scholarship and a Dixon scholarship from Imperial College London. Dr Nguyen was awarded the Imperial Dean’s Fund (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017). Dr Nguyen is grateful to Prof. Malcolm Bolton and Prof. David Potts for their inspiration through their love of research. Dr Nguyen is deeply grateful to Prof. Richard Jardine for delivering lectures in Vietnam after the 56th Rankine lecture.

When I first came to Imperial, it was very lucky that I was on the same lift as Prof. John Burland who inspires many generations of engineers and researchers working on geomechanics.

In my first year PhD at Imperial College, I attended a workshop, GM3 which was organised at UCL by Prof. Mathew Coop. At this workshop, simple explanations from Prof. Malcolm Bolton inspired me. He asked me “when will you make another presentation?” So he can give me feedback to improve my understanding of my current research topic. Luckily at the end of the year 2019, Dr Thomas Shire organised GM3 at Glasgow, but Prof. Malcolm Bolton just encouraged me instead of giving me some feedback.