UCL Engineering Inaugural Lecture Series | Professor Béatrice Baudet

UCL Engineering Inaugural Lecture Series | Professor Béatrice Baudet
Talk title: The multiple scales of soils: a tale of solids and spaces

Don't miss the opportunity to explore groundbreaking research that is shaping the future and transforming the world!

Event details

Date: Wednesday, 11 March 2026

Time: 17:30 - 20:00

Location: UCL Bloomsbury Campus, G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming LT, Roberts Building, Torrington Place, London, WC1E 7JE

Abstract

The fascination, but also difficulty, with soils derives from their complex geological origin combined with their multi-phase, particulate nature. As engineers, we would like to treat them as continua, but we have come to understand that we cannot ignore the microscale if we want to make progress on modelling and predicting their behaviour. Can sands and clays be approached the same way? This lecture will introduce some bases of soil mechanics and show the latest advances in creating a link between the micro- and macroscale.

About Professor Baudet

Professor Béatrice Baudet joined UCL in 2001 having just submitted her PhD (City University, 2001). She left UCL in 2010 to work for The University of Hong Kong, and returned in 2016, where she is now Professor of Soil Mechanics. Béatrice’s undergraduate engineering degree from the Ecole Spéciale des Travaux Publics in Paris (1997) and her MSc in geotechnical engineering from Glasgow University (1997) set the scene for a career dedicated to scientific research and teaching of soil mechanics. Her focus is the fundamental understanding of soil behaviour, from the laboratory macroscale to the microscale. She was awarded the 2021 British Geotechnical Association medal for her work on sand grain roughness and delivered the 2025 Géotechnique Lecture on her latest research on clays from a pores perspective. Béatrice chairs the Belgian research grants panel FWO on Science and Technology of Constructions and the Built Environment. She is and has been associate editor of numerous leading geotechnics journals for about 20 years, including the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, Géotechnique, and Géotechnique Letters of which she was a founding member and was deputy chair during 2013-16.

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