MIT

Question 1

what equipment/resources would you require

What lab space do you need? What equipment do you need?

Answer 1

see other card

Question 2

How did you get the idea for your proposal?

Answer 2

I get a lot of inspirations from talking to people from industry about the problems they are facing and from reading up papers from other disciplines

Question 3

What will you do if you don’t get any external funding?

Answer 3

Tweak the project to see if the project can be completed with the current sources

Prioritise research that does not require additional funding e.g. computational and theoretical work

Seek collaboration to complete the PROJECT

Question 4

What attracted you to the position
Why do you want to join us?
How does accepting a position with us fit into your long-term goals as an academic?

Answer 4

Refer to other card

Question 5

What specific areas of research would you like to pursue

Answer 5

First is the use of ml to automate development of ground models from raw si data

Second is the development of smart offshore foundations that can sense changes in seabed geometry and ground properties

Third is the development of cyclic design methods for suction caissons

Question 6

what would u like to teach?

what can you teach?

Answer 6

Refer to other card

Question 7

What kind of collaboration research do you want to propose?

Who do you think can collaborate with you in our department?

With whom can you collaborate within our College or elsewhere?

Answer 7

I see lots of collaboration opportunities with other faculty members in the group

For e,g,

These are just some of the collaboration opportunities I see at the moment. I’m sure that once I’m more familiar with the department I will find more collaboration opportunities

Question 8

What can you bring in teaching and research?

Describe your experience teaching and your methods for developing successful teaching.

Answer 8

I have had experience teaching a broad range of subjects such as engineering maths, static, structural analysis, hydraulics, soil mechanics and foundation engineering

My methods for successful teaching revolves around building an active learning experience to impart deep understanding of concepts.

There are several techniques to achieve this such as using class quizes to engage students and test their understanding

Using videos and animations to better describe concepts

Blend in class teaching with online learning resources such as online lectures

Question 9

Describe how you would contribute to a climate that attracts and supports students of all
races, nationalities and genders.

Answer 9

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Question 10

What would be my biggest challenge in teaching a new course?

How would I prepare myself to teach a new course?

Answer 10

The biggest challenge is selecting the most important learning outcomes for the course, out of many desirable outcomes

First I would identify the key learning outcomes for the course and the textbooks that would help students achieve these learning outcomes

Then I would prepare the problem sets that would help student reinforce the learning concepts

Finally I would prepare the lesson plan including the order of the course topics

Question 11

What do you think you can improve in your teaching or would like to learn about?

Answer 11

Setting my own syllabus

Question 12

What kind of leadership experience do I have?

• Which leadership skills would I need to develop in the future?

Answer 12

I have previously led the establishment of a new series of talks on cross-disp applications of machine learning

I have now obtained funding from college to expand this work and have now recruited new members to the organising committee to support this expansion

Nevertheless I look forward to further developing my research leadership skills such as sitting on admin committees, supervising and mentoring people etc

Question 13

Who are my professional connections?

You are the coordinator of a European grant application, with whom will you collaborate?
Name five people.

List some competitors/collaborators that you’d like to work with inside and outside the US.

Answer 13

I have collaborators for 2 of my future projects

For my future project on new cyclic design methods for suction caissons my collaborators are frasier bransby from university of western australia and dr Kong from zhejiang university and I’m collaborating with prof houlsby from oxford on the constitutive modelling aspect of the project

For my project on automated ground modelling and ground health monitoring, I’m collaborating with Dr Tingting Zhu from the biomedical engineering dept at oxford, Dr Brian Sheil from the civil eng dept at Oxford, mark cassidy from university of melbourne and barry lehane from the university of western australia

Question 14

How many people are working on your topic?

Answer 14

The main people working on similar areas are the cambridge smart infrastructure group but they are more focused on onshore infrastructure

Offshore foundation suffers from more changing seabed geometry and ground properties due to environmental processes such as sediment transport and scour

Question 15

What will you do if nothing of your proposed experiments work, and do you have a back-up
plan?

Answer 15

I always try to have 3 ongoing projects at the same time a low risk, medium risk and high risk project. The idea is that I will always have some output at the end of the day

I will have collaboration with other researchers on other work which would derisk my research output

Question 16

What is the potential impact of your research in 5 years?

Tell us why your research is meaningful, and why you think it is most important for research
in the future.?

Answer 16

My research provide a new paradigm on how we can use data more intelligently to build more resilient and sustainable, offshore foundations that would offer a pathway to reducing the cost of offshore renewables and aid us in the transition to a low carbon future

Question 17

How do you think you fit with us?

why should we hire you

Answer 17

see other card

Question 18

You will have students in your classes with a range of abilities. How do you keep them all
interested and learning, supporting the weaker students and challenging the stronger?

Answer 18

see other card

Question 19

How is your work different from your postdoc and PhD advisor?

Answer 19

My current work is distinct and different from my advisor work. It is an independent project that I propose and I’m the only person in the group who is applying machine learning in offshore geotechnics

Question 20

What would you like your lab to be known for 5 years down the road?

If we were to nominate you for a big award 10 years down the road, what would this award
be for?

Answer 20

I want my lab to be known for…
Or
I want to win a big award for…

producing innovative, smart, data-driven solutions for foundation engineering

Question 21

What do you think will be the biggest challenges that your research lab would face?

Answer 21

see other card

Question 22

What new courses would you like to develop?

Answer 22

Applied machine learning for foundation engineering

Question 23

Can you please provide an example of your teaching ratings or evaluations?

Answer 23

Based on the student evaluations across the entire 3rd year engineering cohort, I was one of 5 amongst 52 tutors across all engineering disciplines to win a best tutor award

Question 24

How would you balance teaching and research?

Answer 24

Set aside time for both teaching and research

Set specific teaching and research goals

Make use of existing teaching materials and blend my research activities into my teaching

Question 25

Describe outreach activities you have done in the past years?

Answer 25

Teaching assistant in an outreach summer school at oxford

Question 26

Tell us about the biggest challenge you faced as an academic, how you faced it, and what you’d do differently now?

Answer 26

The most difficult challenge in my career was finding the data required for my projects, e,g, the ground data for my automated ground modelling project I tackled this challenge by finding researchers who have these data and collaborate with them. What I'll do differently now is to seek collaboration as a first thought, rather than a last resort, as I feel that the results from collaborations is usually better than individual work as it takes advantages of the expertise from multiple personnels

Question 27

Tell me an example or idea or spin-off that could originate from your research

Answer 27

A software that can automatically generated a bim ground model from raw data. This could be developed as an add-on to existing ground data management tools by vendors such as Bentley or keynetix

Question 28

Has your advisor at xxx influenced your research and how?

Answer 28

I think the best influence my advisor has given me is 1) Providing me with freedom to pursue my own ideas 2) Providing me with a collaborative work environment, with friendly colleagues who all support each other and help turn each of our ideas in reality

Question 29

Describe your first grant proposal THIS is the project that you will start your lab. It must be feasible and fundable. Describe in detail the project with which you will give to your first graduate student. Summarize by telling them how the results from this aim will lead to novel, important, and exciting questions.

Answer 29

My first grant proposal would be on the development of new cyclic design methods for suction caisson foundations, which is a big research gap that requires urgent filling to facilitate future offshore wind farms The first work package is on the development of a robust soil constitutive model that can capture the cyclic soil sample behaviour observed during lab testing. The second work package is on numerical modelling of the caisson problem under cyclic loading using the developed soil model. The results from the numerical modelling will be used to develop multi surface kinematic hardening extensions of the Winkler based design methods that I have developed The third work package is for experimental testing to validate the design methods. This would be in the form of 1g and centrifuge testing. I intend to partner with several organisations on this project. I'm looking to partner with Oxford for the soil lab testing results and UWA for centrifuge testing. On the industry side, I'm currently look at Orsted or Vattenfall for the offshore wind connections, and NGI for their cyclic design experience.

Question 30

How are you going to get funding? IMPORTANT

Answer 30

see other card

Question 31

How much money do you think you’ll need to get your equipment and group up and running?

Answer 31

Computational resources PhD students travel funds to go to conferences equipment funds. The bulk of the cost would go into the fbg sensor equipment. That would cost about 50000 aud. However I'm aware the group has some existing fbg equipments from previous pile projects. if we could collaborate and share those equipments, I could get my projects started at a much lower costs by leveraging the already existing resources

Question 32

Tell us about a conflict you had with a colleague and how you have handled it?

Answer 32

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Question 33

What do you do when students challenge you or have conflicts with each other about controversial issues in class?

Answer 33

It is important to me that my classroom is a safe place for all viewpoints I don't mind if my students challenge me, as long as they do so respectfully and based their arguments on evidence and logic

Question 34

How do you think your field will change the most in the next ten years and why? Where do you see opps?

Answer 34

I believe that data will play an increasingly important role in the field over the next ten years. This is because sensors will get cheaper and We will collect more data than ever. I see an opp in the mismatch between the available hardware solutions vs software solutions that is why my future research activities are focused on developing the software smarts to extract useful info from the data to make better decisions

Question 35

What is the single biggest challenge facing your field right now?

Answer 35

The single biggest challenge is that we are collecting increasingly amount of data but we are not using them to their full potential to make better decisions This is why my future research activities are focused on developing smart software solutions that can extract useful info automatically to drive better decision making

Question 36

how do you feel about teaching large classes?

Answer 36

I believe large classes can be an effective learning environment. I look forward to using new technological innovations to maximize student engagement.