Manuel Parente was granted the “José Folque – Jovens Geotécnicos” award, in the scope of the work developed during his PhD project entitled “Intelligent Earthworks Optimisation System”. This work counted on the supervision of António Gomes Correia, Full Professor from the Department of Civil Engineering and researcher at ISISE, and Paulo Cortez, Associate Professor with Habilitation from the Department of Information Systems and researcher at the ALGORITMI Research Centre, also from the EEUM, and focused on the integration of soft computing technologies, such as metaheuristics and machine learning, as well as geographic information systems. This work also aimed the multi-objective optimisation of earthmoving tasks in road and railway works.

To Manuel Parente, this distinction means “a significant added value, because it happens in the scope of Geotechnics in Portugal. It is also important for me – in personal and professional terms – and for the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, where the project was carried out and awarded, as it certifies the quality of the research produced in the Academy”.

The “José Folque – Jovens Geotécnicos” award aims to recognise works that will contribute to the progress of technical and scientific knowledge and to the resolution of national problems as far as geotechnical specialties contemplated by the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE) are concerned.

The award was granted at the 8th Meeting of Young Geotechnics, which took place during the 1st Seminar on Transportation Geotechnics, in the Auditorium of the Congress Centre of the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering, in Lisbon. As a result of this distinction, the researcher will represent Portugal at the next International Conference of Young Geotechnical Engineers, through the Portuguese Geotechnical Society (SPG).