Thomas Riccio wins 55th Cooling Prize Competition

Thomas Riccio wins 54th Cooling Prize Competition

The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) is pleased to announce that the 55th Cooling Prize was awarded to Thomas Riccio of the University of Dundee for a presentation on Pile installation effects and plugging in soft rock.

The Cooling Prize competition is held annually by the British Geotechnical Association (BGA) and is named after Dr Leonard Cooling, one of the founders of British Soil Mechanics, a former chair of the BGA, and the 2nd Rankine Lecturer. The Cooling Prize competition is intended for professionals in the geotechnical/ground engineering industry in the early stages of their careers.

The 55th Cooling Prize Competition was held as part of the BGA 75th Anniversary Conference at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) in London on 15 October 2024.

The judging panel included City University soil mechanics professor and former BGA chair Sarah Stallebrass, former ICE president and BGA chair Quentin Leiper, GCG senior partner and former BGA chair Chris Menkiti, and University of Cambridge researcher Diarmid Xu – who was last year’s Cooling Prize winner.

The finalists’ poster presentations were followed by a keynote lecture by University of Cambridge emeritus professor Robert Mair on “Unusual tunnel collapses – the role of geotechnics”.

The three Cooling Prize finalists and the subjects of their presentations were:

• Thomas Riccio – University of Dundee, who presented on Pile installation effects and plugging in soft rock
• Hansini Mallikarachchi - Gavin and Doherty Geosolutions, who presented on Two-way Pressure Cycling during Installation of Suction Buckets in Cohesive Soil
• Cheng Wei Kwang – Mott MacDonald, who presented on Enhancing Strain Gauge Data Interpretation through Fast Fourier Transform and Butterworth Filter

Lead judge Stallebrass thanked the finalists for their “excellent” presentations.

“We thought that the presentations were delivered with great clarity and confidence and our final decision was based on very small margins of difference,” she said.

However, the judges felt that Riccio’s presentation stood out because it “delivered a complex topic clearly but also dealt very well with some searching questions”.

Thomas will be invited to write up their presentation for publication in Ground Engineering magazine and will also be invited to give the presentation at a future BGA event.