Professor Ashraf Osman and Co-authors Awarded the 2025 British Geotechnical Association Medal for Outstanding Research

The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) has announced that the 2025 BGA Medal has been awarded to Prof Ashraf S. Osman and his co-authors for their paper “Impact of Suction and Swell-Induced Softening on Pile Behaviour in an Unsaturated Expansive Clay.” The paper is co-authored with Dr Sonu Kumar, a former visiting PhD researcher from IIT‑Mandi, India, who spent a year in Durham under the supervision of Professor Osman; Dr Ashutosh Kumar, Assistant Professor at IIT‑Mandi and a Visiting Fellow at the Durham Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience; and Dr Tiago Gaspar, Assistant Professor at Imperial College London and a former post‑doctoral researcher at Durham who worked with Prof Osman on the EPSRC project WindAfrica.

The BGA judges stated that “the winning paper presents an important and complex problem in unsaturated expansive clays, combining centrifuge testing with advanced 3D coupled FE modelling in a coherent framework. Tested in an instrumented field, the study provides compelling observations offering crucial insights on landslide mechanisms. The ability to capture key mechanisms such as suction loss, swell-induced softening, and their impact on pile behaviour is a clear strength of this work.”