Dr. James (Jim) Hambleton
Associate Professor, Department of Engineering
Fellow, Lecturer & Director of Studies, Gonville and Caius College
University of Cambridge
July 16, 2025 | 9:00 EDT / 15:00 CEST / 22:00 JST
The Soil-Machine Interaction Laboratory (SMI Lab) utilizes a fluidized bed for sample preparation and a fully instrumented 6-axis robotic arm for actuation and force measurement, enabling experiments that characterize force-displacement histories for a variety of objects and motions.
Few if any think about terramechanics early in life as a possibility for a career, and the same can be said for geomechanics, a subdiscipline of civil engineering. This presentation describes the speaker’s journey from structures and solids to geomechanics, and eventually to terramechanics, elucidating links between the areas and discussing findings from various projects. In particular, the speaker's path to developing a successful proposal for a US National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award will be explained, and key outcomes will be presented. The discussion is hopefully useful to aspiring engineers and researchers, as well as practitioners and academics interested in how to attract talent to our fields. “Terramechanics” is here defined as the branch of engineering dealing with the interaction between moving parts and terrain, and research in this area underpins the design of future, autonomous devices for use in civil construction, mining, agriculture, and mobility.
S P E A K E R B I O
Dr. James Hambleton, University of Cambridge
Dr Hambleton was educated at the University of Minnesota, where he completed three degrees (BCE, MS, and PhD) in Civil Engineering. He has broad interests in mechanics, especially in plasticity and soil mechanics. His academic career has taken him around the world, from the US to Australia to England. He has received various awards for research and teaching, including most recently a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025 from US President Joe Biden.
Related Publications
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Ingham, J., Hambleton, J., & Stanier, S. (2025). Terra-Robotics Laboratory: A facility for studying terrain-robot interaction. 26th TAROS Conference. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118347
Hambleton, J. (2022). Inspiring Interest in Geotechnics. figshare. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20346768.v1
Jin, Z., Shi, Z., & Hambleton, J. (2020). Small-scale Geotechnical Testing Using a Six-axis Robot.
Certificate of Attendance provided on request: To request a Certificate of Attendance after attending the event, please email gs@istvs.org. Your attendance will be verified, and the certificate will be issued.