Recent Developments of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnics in Theory and Practice

Dr.-Ing. Merita Tafili was born in Ulqin, Montenegro, and moved to Germany on a DAAD scholarship to pursue her studies. Dr. Tafili completed her B.Sc. (2013), M.Sc. (2016), and PhD (2019) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Since 2020, she has been a Research Associate at Ruhr-University Bochum, working at the Chair of Soil Mechanics, Foundation Engineering, and Environmental Geotechnics. Her research spans the development of material models for soils, investigations into soil behavior under cyclic and dynamic loading, thermo-hydro-mechanical and time-dependent behavior of soils, soil mechanical issues related to the recultivation of opencast lignite mines in the Rhenish mining area, and artificial intelligence in geotechnical engineering. Dr. Tafili has received various scholarships and awards, including the Heinrich Hertz Gesellschaft Prize in 2010, the KIT Doctoral Award, and the Carl Rappert Grundbaupreis in 2020. In 2023, she was awarded a visiting professorship (LFUI Guest Professor) at the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck. Outside of her professional pursuits, Dr. Tafili is the mother of two children.

Professor Dr.-Ing. habil. Torsten Wichtmann is the head of the Chair of Soil Mechanics, Foundation Engineering and Environmental Geotechnics at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Germany. He got his diploma in Civil Engineering from RUB in 2000, finished his PhD at RUB in 2005, followed by a PostDoc phase at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with habilitation in 2016. After two years as a professor for Geotechnical Engineering at Bauhaus University Weimar he joined RUB again in 2019. His main fields of research are experimental investigations on soil behaviour under cyclic and dynamic loading, development of constitutive models and their application in numerical studies of geotechnical problems. The latter comprises foundations of offshore wind turbines, the recultivation of lignite opencast mines as lakes, energy geostructures, engineered barriers of underground nuclear waste storage facilities and applications related to mechanized tunneling. Sustainable methods of soil improvement, including polymers and bio-cementation, are also in the focus of his research.

Dr.-Ing. Jan Machaček is the head of the “Numerical Geotechnics” working group at the Institute of Geotechnics at the Technical University of Darmstadt. He obtained his B.Sc. (2014), M.Sc. (2016), and PhD (2019) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). From 2020 to 2024, he was a Research Associate at both Ruhr-University Bochum and the Technical University of Darmstadt. Since 2024, he has held his current position as Head of the “Numerical Geotechnics” group. His main research areas include the development of numerical methods to describe hydraulic-mechanical coupled soil behaviour under monotonic, cyclic, and dynamic loading; machine learning methods in geotechnical engineering, such as the automatic calibration of advanced material models; and addressing challenges related to the reclamation of opencast lignite mines and the assessment of geotechnical infrastructure buildings. These works have led to the development of the freely available finite element program numgeo.