Aaron S. Bradshaw, from University of Rhode Island, is the winner of this year’s Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) Educational Trust Young Professor Paper Competition.

His paper, “Pile Load Transfer from Static Loading Test Inversions,” presents an inversion approach to estimate the distribution of load at depth in a deep foundation from the load-movement curve measured at the head. The method may be useful in situations where static loading tests have been performed on test piles that are not instrumented with strain gages or telltales, or the instrumentation data are unreliable.

Bradshaw earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1996 from Tufts University, his master’s in ocean engineering in 1999 from the University of Rhode Island, and his Ph.D. in civil engineering in 2006 from the University of Rhode Island. He worked as a geotechnical engineering consultant at Hart Crowser in Seattle from 2000 to 2003. Bradshaw has been a faculty member in the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Rhode Island since 2011, and is currently an assistant professor. His research interests include the performance of deep foundations and marine anchoring systems, and the dynamic behavior of soils. 

The first runner-up for the Young Professor Paper Competition is C. Guney Olgun, from Virginia Tech. His paper is titled "Experimental Investigation of Thermal Pile Response under Heating and Cooling Loads."

The awards were presented at the DFI 40^th Annual Conference on Deep Foundations in October 2015, in Oakland, Calif.

The DFI is an international association of contractors, engineers, academics and suppliers in the deep foundations industry with more than 3,300 members worldwide. For more information about the Deep Foundations Institute, visit www.dfi.org.