Horris Kuchilunda Nangulama

After graduating from the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Malawi, The Polytechnic in 2017, Horris K. Nangulama worked for almost a year (from January 2018 – September, 2018) as an infrastructural and quality assurance engineer at Central East African Railway (CEAR), Limbe, Malawi. In October, 2018, he joined the University of Malawi as a lecturer in mine ventilation in the department of mining engineering. In 2019, he continued his MSc at Zhejiang University in China, and worked on the cyclic loading properties of soft clay. Then his subsequent research interests have expanded to mining, geology, rock mechanics, soil anisotropy and its application in road bed. Ground improvement is his another research interest. He worked on cast-in-situ large-diameter tubular pile and its application on embankment. He focused on electric-osmosis method in the improvement of mined soil wastes. While at Zhejiang University, he initiated stress-induced anisotropy study, first on intact and remoulded soft clay, then on loess. He put forward the failure criterion for the soils experienced principal stress rotation and conducts systematic studies from macro to micro behaviour. He advanced a system that is capable of minimising excavation-induced deformation during deep excavation and ensure the project execution and surrounding environment safety respectively. He analysed the abandoned mine wastes and proposed the best recycling techniques using the principle of circular economy. His work on this perspective won the first prize of Zhejiang Science and Technology Progress Award in 2021. Further, Horris Nangulama has recently been invited to the 17th Asian Regional Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where, among others, he is expected to present the working mechanism of a newly developed system (Steel-servo geo-technology) that self-adjust to actively control excavation induced deformation during deep excavation.