Professor Sheng, Head of Discipline of Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering, has a Bachelor of Science from Lanzhou University in China and a Licentiate in Engineering and a PhD from Lulea University of Technology, Sweden. In his role as Co-Director of the Priority Research Centre for Geotechnical and Materials Modelling, Sheng will be chief investigator for a large 2015 ARC-funded study on the mechanics of hard soils and soft rocks, and will also be an investigator on another 2015 ARC-funded study on unsaturated soil-structure interaction with emphasis on buried pipelines. Hard soils and soft rocks are transitional materials that have properties evolving from soft rock to soft soil. They are widespread in Australia and typical examples include mudstone, claystones, shales and tuffs. These materials are very difficult to handle in construction, mainly due to the fact that their strength, stiffness and volume can change substantially in response to environmental actions such as wetting and drying. Proper prediction of the transitional behaviour of these materials is crucially important for analysing the stability and serviceability of civil structures founded on them.