Neville Centre of Excellence in Cement and Concrete Engineering
The Annual PhD Competition and Neville Centre Symposium
The Neville Centre was created with the support of the Neville family, which wanted to support the next generation of experts – and as such, it proposed the creation of an annual award to recognise the best UK-based PhD students working in cement and concrete.
As a result, the Centre operates the annual Adam Neville Best UK Based PhD in Cement and Concrete Engineering Competition, which is conducted in collaboration with the Concrete Society. The winning entrant receives a cash prize of £2,000 donated by the Neville family.
Since 2018, the PhD competition has been run jointly with the Neville Centre Symposium. This yearly gathering gives academics and industrial partners the chance to promote innovations in cement and concrete design engineering. Recent Symposium themes include “Transformative materials” and “Designing for a low-carbon infrastructure”.
The Centre also continues to offer an international audience the opportunity to observe leading research and technical developments from both academia and industry through its Autumn and Spring seminar series and its newly developed biannual CPD course, “Multi-scale cracking of concrete materials,” which it introduced in 2021 in collaboration with RILEM.
The 2024 PhD competition winner: Imogen Ridley, University of Leeds
Our three PhD prize finalists are Teijun Ding, Armin Jamali, and Imogen Ridley, along with Professor John Forth. Imogen won with her presentation entitled ‘Developing the understanding of external edge restraint in reinforced concrete walls’.
Previous prize winners
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2023 – Zengliang Yue, University of Leeds: “A novel multi-physics modelling framework to reduce the uncertainty of the carbonation resistance and carbon capture potential of concrete materials.”
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2022 – Tamara Chidiac, University of Sheffield: “Durability and service life modelling of alkali-activated concrete.”
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2021 – Deema Abu-Salma, Imperial College London: “Efficient strategy for modelling and assessing punching shear failure at edge and corner flat slab-column connections.”
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2020 – Antonia Yorkshire, University of Sheffield: “Uranium, plutonium and technetium interaction with cement materials for radioactive waste management.”
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2019 – Andri Setiawan, Imperial College London: “Efficient strategy for modelling punching failure of flat slabs.”
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2018 – Giacomo Torelli, University of Manchester: “A confinement and moisture dependent constitutive model for concrete subjected to transient high temperatures.”