Prof. Soga and his team carry out research in the field of geotechnical engineering and infrastructure engineering. They are interested in developing new monitoring technologies, which allow gaining insight in the behavior of infrastructure, detecting anomalies and providing data for performance analyses. They are also conducting research on city-scale modeling and simulations to evaluate the value of sensing for better management of infrastructure during operation as well as for better response during and after natural disasters such as earthquakes and wildfires. Therefore, three fields of research are required – sensing technology, city-scale modeling and computational geomechanics.
Brief history of research:
Prof. Soga’s research background is in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering, which has been applied to numerous research projects such as tunneling and deep excavation, soil fracturing and grouting, and submarine landslide. However, Prof. Soga’s research interest could not be contained solely within the aforementioned geomechanical processes where he has a strong background, and it expanded to infrastructure monitoring in early 2000 as he emphasized on the importance of maintaining and managing ageing infrastructures. Prof. Soga started accepting researchers and PhD students with background in electronics and photonics, and his effort lead to the creation of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction at University of Cambridge, where he was Professor of Civil Engineering until 2016. Since then Prof. Soga has energetically carried out research on distributed fiber optic monitoring, wireless sensing, computer vision, micro electro-mechanical sensors and energy harvesting. Prof. Soga’s research interest has further expanded to a few more different areas such as geothermal energy and city-scale modeling of infrastructure systems using high performance computing.