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Dr. Junghee Park and Professor J.Carlos Santamarina have been awarded the distinguished Tarek Al-Kasabi Award for Excellence in Civil Engineering in Saudi Arabia for their groundbreaking article, the "Revised Soil Classification System for Coarse-Fine Mixtures." They will accept the award during a ceremony held at King Saud University, Saudi Arabia's oldest university in Riyadh on April 11.

According to Junghee and Carlos: "Our article builds on 100 years of geotechnical engineering research and practice, which allows us to advance the "physics-inspired and data-driven" Revised Soil Classification System. This development is the first step for a new era in geotechnical engineering that will benefit from simple yet robust index testing coupled with extensive material databases in Multiphysics IT tools to provide a self-consistent set of engineering parameters for design. This is a critically needed development to overcome the inherent danger in complex computer-based analyses that are overtaking today's geotechnical engineering."

The King Saud University's website notes that the "Al-Kasabi award was   instituted in 2015 by the endowment of Engineer Tarek Al-Kasabi. This prestigious Award is annually given to those Scientists, Engineers or Researchers who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to one or more of the fields of Civil Engineering." The award also comes with a prize of 100,000 riyals.

Junghee and Carlos extended their gratitude to Dr. Abdullah Almajed at King Saud University for his nomination, the Scientific Committee for selecting their work and especially to Tarek Al-Kasabi for his great vision and generosity.