The research work has been carried out by numerous co-workers from different countries. The research proposals are approved by the foundation board. Currently, the following fellows are financially supported by the foundation:

Carlotta Guardiani, MSc.

Carlotta Guardiani is a PhD student at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. In her dissertation, she focuses on slope stability of rainfall- and reservoir-induced landslides, investigating the relationship between triggering factors and slope deformations. The goal of her PhD is the development of an artificial intelligence method for landslide prediction based on long-term monitoring data.

She studied Environmental Engineering and graduated in 2016 with a Master in Land Protection and Natural Risks Prevention gained at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy. Her expertise is the integrated risk assessment of landslides. Before starting her PhD, she worked for the Austrian Geological Survey for three years and gathered experience in geophysical site characterization and landslide monitoring techniques.

 

Dr. Shun Wang

Dr. Shun Wang is a post-doc working on constitutive theories, numerical modeling, and geo-hazards. His research interest is constitutive modeling of geomaterials focusing on geomechanics, thermomechanics, and unsaturated soil mechanics. Dr. Wang also has wide experience in laboratory and field testing of shear zone material from slow-moving landslides. He has published several papers about constitutive models of sands and clays, numerical simulation of geomaterials, and creep properties of shear zone material. He has been taking part in several EU projects dealing with geo-hazards.

Dr. Debayan Bhattacharya

Dr. Debayan Bhattacharya currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Prior to this, Dr. Bhattacharya did his Ph.D. (Civil Engineering) at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India with a major in geotechnical engineering. Dr. Bhattacharya has published peer-reviewed articles and conference papers pertaining to the fundamental behaviour of soils. His research interest involves exploring instabilities and failure mechanisms in granular media (sand in particular) at different “length-scales” viz., continuum, discrete, ‘single element-level’ both from a computational and experimental perspective. His expertise also lies in instrumentation and experimental geomechanics with advanced type of triaxial testing involving true-triaxial, plane-strain, bender-elements, etc.  

Dr. Enrico Soranzo

Dr. Enrico Soranzo is a Vienna based Italian MBA graduate at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Project Management specialisation) with a thesis on the application of Project Finance to Tunnel Engineering. He finished his doctoral thesis on “Physical modelling and numerical analysis of the face stability of shallow tunnels in partially saturated soil” at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU). Dr. Soranzo is a chartered civil engineer with a solid background in geotechnical engineering and five years of experience in engineering megaprojects and building site monitoring.

MSc. Mohammad Javad Alipour

MSc. Mohammad Javad Alipour is a PhD Student at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. He finished his Master program at the Shiraz University of Technology in the major of Geotechnical engineering in 2017. He has the experience of working on liquefaction, numerical modelling, constitutive modelling and laboratory SS testing. Furthermore, MSc. Alipour has published articles about the instability of granular materials under CSD stress path by using an elastoplastic constitutive model, and instability of loose sand in the simple shear tests. In his PhD program, he is working on the hypoplastic constitutive model, fast movement of granular materials and ring shear testing.

MSc. Yadong Wang

MSc. Yadong Wang is a PhD Student at the Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, BOKU. His doctoral research topic is numerical simulation of geotechnical processes. He is mainly responsible for numerical modeling using hypoplastic constitutive models and improved learning of SPH with GPU accelerated method for landslide. MSc. Wang completed his master's courses in Geotechnical Engineering (Earthquake Engineering) and his graduation thesis at Beijing University of Technology in July 2019. The master's project is nonlinear analysis of layered soils under the oblique incidence of earthquake.