Dr Adnan Sufian

Dr Adnan Sufian completed his PhD at UNSW Sydney, spending one year as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the University of Queensland, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Imperial College London and has also worked as a geotechnical engineer with SMEC Australia. Dr Sufian's field of research is in the area of multi-scale and multi-phase mechanics of granular materials. His research aims to develop tools and guidelines so that geotechnical engineers can better handle, manipulate and construct with granular materials, and this can lead to innovative solutions to geotechnical issues surrounding the development of urban infrastructure. He is also interested in understanding natural phenomena associated with granular geomaterials such as landscapes affected by erosion, mass movement of materials in landslides, and mitigating the spread of contaminants in subsurface flows. Dr Sufian has strong expertise in the development of novel, efficient and rigorous multi-scale computational modelling techniques, including the Discrete Element Method, Computational Fluid Dynamics and Network Models, with a core focus on the interaction of water with soil particles. His research is naturally multidisciplinary and he currently collaborates with physicists, mathematicians and engineers to uncover emergent phenomena from the collective behaviour of granular particles.