Dr. Thejesh Kumar Garala is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering at IIT Madras, Chennai, India. He earned his PhD in 2020 from the University of Cambridge, UK, where his research focused on the dynamic behavior of soft clays and the seismic soil-structure interaction between pile foundations and soft clay. His PhD work extensively utilized the centrifuge facilities at the Schofield Centre, University of Cambridge. Prior to his PhD, Dr. Garala completed his Master’s in Geotechnical Engineering in 2015 from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH).

Following his doctoral studies, Dr. Garala worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. During his tenure, he contributed to EU-funded projects investigating the stability of partially saturated slopes under flooding conditions and the interaction between spoil (overburden) material and foundations for onshore wind turbines. His research involved advanced elemental and centrifuge testing to characterize and understand the behavior of spoil material, particularly under partially saturated conditions. He also tackled challenges associated with centrifuge modeling of heterogeneous spoil materials and partially saturated slopes.

Before joining IIT Madras, Dr. Garala served as an Offshore Geotechnical Consultant at Fugro GB Limited in Wallingford, UK. At Fugro, he worked on numerous consultancy projects related to offshore site investigations, advanced and cyclic soil parameter determination, interpretation of CPT and other field data, pile capacity and driveability assessments, and foundation recommendations for various offshore infrastructures. His projects also included reassessment of oil and gas platforms, evaluation of pile installation effects on existing infrastructure, jack-up leg penetration assessments, mudmat capacities, and VH(M) envelope analyses. Additionally, Dr. Garala led a research and development project for the Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority, developing site-specific geotechnical guidelines for jack-up analysis.