Finalists Announced for the 56th Cooling Prize Competition 2025
The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2024 Cooling Prize Competition to be hosted by the Yorkshire Geotechnical Group in Leeds on 11 February 2025.
Details of the event can be found here.
The Cooling Prize is held annually to celebrate the life of the late Dr Leonard Cooling, past chairman of the British Geotechnical Society Committee (forerunner of today’s BGA), to encourage young ground engineers to hone their technical paper-writing and oral presentation skills.
The Cooling Prize Finalists are:
Serena Pak Chi Che – Geotechnical Consulting Group
Overcoming challenges in horizontal directional drilling (HDD) with geotechnical engineering
Serena is a senior geotechnical engineer at Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG). She joined GCG after she completed her MSc in Soil Mechanics at Imperial College London. She has worked closely with developer and contractor clients within the UK and internationally, with a focus on horizontal directional drilling (HDD), site characterisation, and offshore energy projects. From 2022 to 2023, Serena took up a technical advisory role as the on-site geotechnical engineer for an offshore wind developer for their cable landfall HDD works for an offshore windfarm. During her site work, she contributed to overcoming several interesting geotechnical and drilling-related challenges.
Maria Chalakatevaki – University of Cambridge
A geotechnical plasticity framework for cable-seabed interaction modelling
Maria Chalakatevaki is a PhD candidate within the Geotechnical and Environmental Research Group and the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in “Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Resilience in a Changing World (FIBE2)” at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on geotechnical stability modelling for static subsea power cables with the goal of promoting an innovative framework to enhance soil-structure interaction modelling for offshore wind applications. Prior to her PhD, she obtained an MEng from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and an MRes from the University of Cambridge.
Alexander Swallow – University of Oxford
Grout Injection in Open Caisson Shaft Construction
Alexander Swallow is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Oxford, where he is researching ways to reduce carbon emissions in underground construction, with a focus on microtunnelling and open caisson shafts. His work spans advanced laboratory modelling, case studies, and numerical simulations to enhance design, reduce material use, and optimise construction methods. Alexander’s research has been published in leading journals, including Géotechnique and the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering.
James Creasey – University of Bristol
ROBOCONE p-y module: A new site investigation tool
James Creasey is a final year PhD student at the University of Bristol, where he is researching and developing a new in-situ site investigation tool – The ROBOCONE p-y module. Prior to his PhD studies, James achieved his Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Surrey and gained over 2 years industry experience working for a civil engineering contractor on railway slope stabilisation projects.
