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Dr Sam Bahmani is a geotechnical engineer and lecturer currently working at Te Pukenga/Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand. He completed his PhD in geotechnical engineering at the University of Auckland, where he focused on developing a more efficient way to model and predict the behaviour of highly crushable particles under various loading conditions using Python code. Before joining academia, Dr Bahmani worked as a geotechnical engineer, gaining valuable practical experience in the field. Additionally, he has served as a lecturer for several years, sharing his expertise with the next generation of engineers. Dr Bahmani's research interests include numerical modelling, geotechnical earthquake engineering, and the behaviour of soils and particles under different conditions. He is passionate about finding innovative solutions to complex problems in the geotechnical field. Throughout his career, Dr Bahmani has received numerous awards and accolades for his research and teaching, and he continues to make significant contributions to the field of geotechnical engineering
Dr Gunawardena is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne undertaking research in many areas such as structural engineering, offsite manufacturing, design optimisation, building information modelling, prefabricated buildings, steel structures, timber composites, acoustic performance of structures, recycling and upcycling of waste materials, wind effects on tall buildings and shear behaviour of concrete. He is a member of the newly formed Australian Standards Committee on Prefabricated Buildings and also a working group committee member for the Australian Standard on Design of post-installed and cast-in fastenings in concrete. While serving as an active reviewer for many Q1 journals, he is currently a Co-editor for the open access topic collection on ‘Offsite Manufactured Buildings’ in Encyclopedia Engineering. He currently serves as a CI (chief investigator) for two Australian government issued grants while leading projects currently and in the past under many such grants including the widely-known ARC Centre for Advanced Manufacturing of Prefabricated Housing (CAMPH). He is also a lecturer for the subjects ‘High rise structures’ and ‘Building information modelling – BIM’ at the University of Melbourne.