Jon Trevelyan is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at Durham University. After obtaining his PhD in Civil Engineering from Bristol (studying the dynamics of double curvature arch dams) he worked for over a decade in industry. The majority of this period was spent with the Computational Mechanics Group, developers of the BEASY software, and included seven years running the North American operations of the Group.  On his return to the UK, Jon made a career change into academia, first spending one year at the University of Brighton, and then in 1996 being appointed to a lectureship at Durham, where he spent the remainder of his career. His early years at Durham working alongside Professor Peter Bettess were formative ones, particularly in together developing enriched BEM formulations for acoustics problems. The idea of using non-standard basis functions, removing the adherence to piecewise polynomial elements, has been a continuing unifying theme in his research since then, and has led to promising developments in enriched BEM schemes for fracture mechanics and to isogeometric BEM approaches.  Jon’s BEM software has been used for over twenty years in the aerospace sector. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and has also served a four-year term as Head of the (then) School of Engineering and Computing Sciences in Durham. Jon formally retired in 2023 but has retained Emeritus Professor status so he can still access Matlab.

Charles Augarde is Head of Department and Professor of Civil Engineering in the Department of Engineering at Durham University. He has been an academic at Durham since 2001, being promoted to Professor in 2013. Prior to Durham he spent six years in industry, working for Manchester City Engineer's Dept on road, bridge and sewer design and construction, achieving Chartered Engineer (CEng) status in the process, then returned to academia to do a PhD on finite elemnt analysis of tunnelling at Oxford University. After his PhD, and a brief period as a lecturer in structural engineering at the University of Westminster, he returned to Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer in Engineering Science where he stayed until 2001. Charles’s research interests lie in development of numerical methods aimed mainly at problems in geotechnics, but with a substantial presence in the field of computational fracture mechanics, and a totally separate interest in earthen construction methods and materials.     

Dr Robert Bird is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) at Durham University, UK. He obtained his PhD in 2019 from Durham University researching hp-adaptive finite element methods for accurate crack propagation.  After his PhD he accepted a PDRA position at Imperial College London. At Imperial he developed methods to model, and quantitatively define, fracture intensity (P32) from subsurface blast shock waves in rocks. He also developed analytical methods to analyse the reflection of pulse-waves impinging on fractures. Currently at Durham he uses the material point method (MPM) for modelling rigid bodies interacting with non-linear materials.  Much of this work is focused on formulations for frictional contact and imposition of boundary conditions due to the lack of defined material boundary with the MPM. His other focus is on crack propagation, both discrete and phase-field type fracture, combined with residual based a posteriori error estimation for hp-adaptivity with the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method. They key aim with this research is to allow computational trackable simulations with no a priori knowledge of where cracks will propagate.   During Robert’s PhD he won two prizes for his distinguished research, the 2016 ACME Conference Award for Best Post-Graduate Research Student and the 2020 UKACM Roger Owen Award for the best PhD thesis. Additionally, he was a finalist in 2021 for the international ECCOMAS best PhD thesis and the 11th ECCOMAS PhD Olympiad.