Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
Jonathan Nuttall, completed a BEng (hons) in Mechanical Engineering at UMIST, in 2002 and received the Rowland S. Benson Prize, awarded to the student with best performance in Applied Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics. It was during this course that the he gained his first experiences of Finite Element Analysis and its practical use within engineering analysis and design. He continued his studies, completing a masters in Applied Numerical Computing, in the Department of Mathematics at Manchester University. During his masters degree his skills and knowledge of Finite Element Analysis, Fortran programming and parallel computation were furthered; completing courses in each. It was here where the he gained the motivation to continue into research, expanding and combining his previous knowledge base to conduct the work which became his PhD thesis and the basis for his current research. Towards the end of his PhD, he became a Research Assistant; firstly at the University of Manchester, evaluating the consolidation and strength of low level stored wastes, for Sellafield Ltd., before moving to TUDelft to continue his research into the Random Finite Element Method, Random Fields, Random Number Generation and Parallel Computation Methods, focusing on largescale slope stability analysis. This research has expanded, while undertaking projects for organisations such as Plaxis bv., Deltares and the European Union, to include a wider field of topics including probabilistic methods, inverse modelling and fracture modelling.
I oversee the development and implementation of new and emerging technologies in the field of data science, machine learning and AI into the company workflows. Furthermore, I help in the development of numerical modelling software, between several departments within the organization, most notably the Geotechnical and Computational Department. This includes responsibility for the validation and testing of highly specialized computational models, product development for use in industry, and the development of engineering theory from theory into usable engineering tools. Furthermore I teach in various disciplines.
The main focus of research is stochastic and probabilistic analyses using Finite Element modelling. While I also lecture and provide tutorials to bachelors and masters students and aid in course and exam preparations. In this role I also continue to maintain a parallel computer capability within the Geo-Engineering section of the Geo Technology Department at TUDelft, and maintain the parallel computational work of the Soil Mechanics research group led by the Prof.dr. Michael A. Hicks, who is also Head of Section. During this role I have also work on a number of other research projects within the group, with focus on probabilistic methods, inverse modelling, large scale slope stability analyses, modelling fracture propogation and parallel computation.
This role is a collaboration between Deltares, TUDelft and PLAXIS bv to undertake the development and implementation of an approach to solve inverse modelling problems. My role is that of Project manager, both managing and undertaking the implementation of the approach, using the appropriate theory. The responsibilities of this role include, time managing project, liaising with academic, industrial and commercial partners, TUDelft, Deltares and PLAXIS bv, about project requirements allowing for a tailored implementation. Team communication and management was also important. It is envisaged that the final implementation will provide PLAXIS’ commercial software with inverse modelling capabilities. In this six month role I am directly supervised by Professor Michael Hicks at Delft University of Technology as project lead.
The main focus of this role was to investigate, implement and maintain a parallel computer capability with the Geo-Engineering section of the Geo Technology Department at TUDelft. Further to this was the need to implement and maintain the parallel computational work of the Soil Mechanics research group led by the Prof.dr. Michael A. Hicks, who is also Head of Section. During this role I have also worked on a number of other projects within the group. These projects focused on probabilistic analyses and methods, large scale slope stability analyses, inverse modelling and parallel computation. I also aided senior staff with educational activities including course design, teaching and exam activities.