Dr. Brian Sheil
Laing O’Rourke Associate Professor of Construction Engineering and Director of the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction at the University of Cambridge.
He earned his PhD in Geotechnical Engineering from the University of Galway, Ireland, before joining the University of Oxford in 2014 as a postdoctoral researcher. He was subsequently appointed as a Departmental Lecturer and awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship in 2018. He took up his current position at Cambridge in 2022. In 2025, he was awarded an Open Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for his work on digital underground construction.
Ing. Duco Bergwerf MSEng
Manager Engineering and Design VSF
Working as an engineer in Civil Engineering in various positions and roles since 1997. At the time, started as a work planner/executioner at Nederhorst Grondtechniek. From 2001 to mid-2013 worked mainly in work preparation on large-scale civil infrastructure projects for BAM and Van Hattum en Blankevoort. In 2013, he switched to structural design and was involved in civil projects first as a structural engineer and later as a design leader. Since January 2024, he has been working as Manager Engineering and Design at VSF.
Prof. Lidija Zdravkovic
Professor of Computational Geomechanics at Imperial College London
She has been an academic staff member of Imperial College London since 1996, becoming full professor in 2013. She was Head of the Geotechnics division in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department for ten years, until 2024. Her research integrates soil characterisation and numerical modelling to assess geotechnical infrastructure, climate change impact, offshore foundations, energy geostructures and nuclear waste disposal, recently expanding her interests to data science and machine learning. She has consulted on several major infrastructure projects and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She has published over 250 technical papers and has been awarded prizes from the British Geotechnical Association (BGA) and the Institution of Civil Engineers, UK, and the 2019 Imperial College President’s Medal for Excellence in Education. She delivered the prestigious Rankine Lecture in March 2024 and is currenlty the Géotechnique Editor-in-Chief.