Biography

Dr Brian Sheil studied Civil Engineering for his undergraduate degree at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). His PhD was a collaboration between NUIG and the University of California, Berkeley on the behaviour of pile group foundations. In 2014, Brian joined the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher in experimental geotechnics focused on industry-funded research projects and was subsequently promoted to departmental lecturer in geotechnical engineering in January 2017. He was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship (at Oxford) in March 2018. At the same time, he was also awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St Catherine’s College. In January 2021, Brian was also appointed to the position of Honorary Research Senior Lecturer at NUIG. In 2022, he was awarded the title of Associate Professor. In September 2022, Brian moved to University of Cambridge to take up the Laing O’Rourke Associate Professorship in Construction Engineering while holding a Visiting Fellowship at University of Oxford. In 2023 he co-founded a tech start-up developing AI solutions for infrastructure where he works part-time as Chief Scientist. In 2024 he became director of the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) at Cambridge and was recently awarded an EPSRC Open Fellowship for his work on ‘Digital Underground Construction’.

Brian is an editor of the journal ‘Data-Centric Engineering’, is an Associate Editor for ‘Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering’ and is an editorial board member for both ‘Tunnelling & Underground Space Technology’ and ‘Underground Space’. He sits on the ISSMGE Technical Committee TC222 for Geotechnical BIM and Digital Twins and he is a member of the EC3 ‘Data Sensing & Acquisition’ work group. He recently received the ‘Young Researcher Award 2022’ from the Civil Engineering Research Association of Ireland, the ‘Bright Spark Lecture Award’ from the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering and the ‘Geotechnical Engineering Proceedings Lecture’ nominated by the Editorial Panel of ICE Proceedings Geotechnical Engineering.