College position(s)
Fellow, Director of Studies
Subject
Engineering
Specialising in
Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering
Professor Gopal Madabhushi
Degrees, Awards and Prizes
PhD (Cantab), MTech, FICE, FIGS, FCPS, FCCS
Research themes
Working in earthquake engineering is always exciting – discovering new phenomena in ground behaviour such as earthquake induced liquefaction or simply visiting earthquake effected regions to research on how buildings collapsed. One of the highlights was when we modelled a prehistoric earthquake event on our high-gravity centrifuge for a BBC programme (Ancient Apocalypses) to show how earthquakes could have destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Currently we are working on earthquake vulnerability of offshore wind turbine foundations as the wind industry expands to South-East Asia, particularly Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Responsibilities
I enjoy teaching both at Girton and the Engineering Department. I am constantly looking at bringing the excitement from my research into teaching by designing new labs or showing linkages between theory and current engineering practice. For example, we are now developing a model of offshore wind turbine to demonstrate how seabed may change the vibration response of a wind turbine and can cause resonance.
Other
I am the Director of Schofield Centre, a magical place that specialises in playing with expensive toys in the name of Soil Mechanics. My job is to make sure that the research students are enjoying their work, buy them expensive research gear and hold my breath when they test them under high gravity and hope they won’t break them.
Shamsher Prakash Research Award 2005 – for contributions to Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering .
TK Hsieh award by Institution of Civil Engineers, UK in 2005, 2010, 2013 – for outstanding papers in the area of Dynamics in Civil Engineering
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