Dr. Brian Sheil is the 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.
His presentation will be on Physics-Informed Machine Learning for Geotechnics: Integrating Theory, Data, and Computation.
This talk will explore the emerging field of physics-informed machine learning in geotechnical engineering, with a specific focus on how the integration of fundamental soil mechanics, experimental and field data, and advanced computational methods can overcome limitations of traditional modelling approaches. It will highlight recent advances in embedding physics into data-driven architectures to achieve varying levels of physical constraint.
Finally, the talk will examine new strategies for leveraging models of differing fidelities to enable more accurate, efficient, and generalisable predictions for geotechnical design and analysis.
More information and other keynote speakers can be found here.
