Assistant Professor, Department of Ocean Engineering,
IIT Madras, Chennai, India
I am Thejesh Kumar Garala, currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at IIT Madras. Previously, I worked as an Offshore Geotechnical Consultant at Fugro, Wallingford, UK, and prior to that, as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. I earned my PhD in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK.
My research interests include, but are not limited to, offshore geotechnics, ground modelling, geohazard assessment, optimisation of offshore site investigation, foundations for offshore infrastructure, jack-up interactions, static and seismic soil – structure interaction, physical modelling, experimental geotechnics, soil dynamics, and geotechnical earthquake engineering. During my post-doc, I worked on EU-funded projects that investigated the stability of partially saturated slopes under flooding conditions, and the interaction between spoil (overburden) material and foundations for onshore wind turbines. Advanced elemental and centrifuge tests were performed to characterise and better understand the behaviour of spoil material, especially under partially saturated conditions. Challenges associated with the centrifuge modelling of heterogeneous spoil material and partially saturated slopes were also tackled.
