The MINRESCUE Symposium was held during 15-16 June 2023 at Główny Instytut Górnictwa (GIG) presenting the work done by different collaborators within the MINRESCUE project consortium during the past 2+ years, in particular results of studies on physical & mineralogical characteristics of CMW geomaterials at GIG & University of Exeter; their mechanical & geotechnical behaviour at University of Warwick, SYSTRA Subterra & Poltegor-Instytut; CMWG recycled concrete and mortars at Politecnico di Milano, University of Cergy-Pontoise & University of Warwick; and of course LCA of upcycling CMWGs in construction materials by BRGM. It was a great opportunity to interact with colleagues & friends, as well as external engineers & researchers to disseminate the project results and our vision for their realisation, also to plan for future collaborations. Thanks to Dr Aleksander Wrana and his team at GIG for excellent organization of this two-day hybrid Symposium in Katowice, Poland.

The UKACM 2023Link opens in a new window was hosted at Warwick during 19th-21st April. The event, that was co-chaired by Dr Rezania and Dr Mousavi Nezhad, was a great success. This was the first time that UK Computational Mechanics community came to Warwick and they have been impressed by the conference organisation, Warwick campus and the research we do here. There was a great opening talk by Sotaro Kita, director of research culture, about STEM grant challenge and Warwick’s future research plan. We had representative from over 30 universities, 70 talks scheduled and delivered in three parallel sessions, 5 Keynotes speeches and two lectures delivered by outstanding scientists.

Special Thanks to the conference scientific committee, Toby Mottram, James Kermode, Duncan Lockerby, Albert Bartok-Partay, Susana Gomes, and Lukasz Figiel. Thanks are extended to the members of our research team, Nima Sarmadi, Hamid Moghimi, Hesam Dejaloud, Stefano Seccia, Huxi Xin, Thanh Vo, and Josephine Foghi who helped a great deal in running the conference smoothly.

We are excited to share that our work "Adaptive anisotropic constitutive modeling of natural claysLink opens in a new window" published in International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics by Dejaloud and Rezania, is recognised as the Top Downloaded Article in the journal during its first 12 months of publication!

Our journal paper "Double image stress point bounding surface model for monotonic and cyclic loading on anisotropic claysLink opens in a new window" was featured by distinguished Prof. John Carter in his 2023 Rankine Lecture on "Constitutive Modelling in Computational Geomechanics". Prof Carter praised our work in setting good practice on model parameter determination, he mentioned that "the authors provided a flowchart that guides you through the process for determining values of their model’s parameters and it’s most instructive, not only does it advise what type of test should be used to identify certain parameters but it also provides useful advice of when and importantly when not to adopt their model and in my opinion it would be very useful if others would follow this type of example". We are very pleased by these comments from such an eminent scientist in the field of constitutive modelling.

The full lecture can be watched from YouTube link: 61st Annual BGA Rankine LectureLink opens in a new window.