New adventures at the University of Cambridge

In September 2023, Jim and his family relocated to England, where Jim has taken up the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.  He is also a Fellow and College Lecturer at Gonville and Caius College, where Rodney Hill, David Tabor, Stephen Hawking, and a great many others […]

Ana graduated!

Ana just sent pictures from graduation this past spring, and not a minute has been wasted generating this post (please forgive any typos).   Congratulations on completing your PhD, Ana!!!   The citation and abstract for her thesis are below, for those who may be curious about her research.  Feel free to send me (Jim) […]

Inspiring Interest in Geotechnics

I had the pleasure of giving the Bright Spark Lecture at IS-Cambridge last month (https://www.is-cambridge2020.eng.cam.ac.uk/programme/speciallectures) and yesterday got around to creating and posting a recording for posterity.   Here it is on figshare, in fully citable format.  Thanks in advance for the nod if you find any of it useful in your teaching or research: […]

Time to start blogging again!

It’s been a long time since there has been activity on this website.  As of today, that is changing!  There is a lot of stuff to share, including cool things that students in the Hambleton Research Group have been up to, and things that I (Jim) have been up to.   That includes a few graduations, […]

EA2 Hangout with Hands-on Mechanics

We are running a new, totally optional activity in the Winter Quarter of the 2019-2020 academic year to support and enhance the freshmen engineering course Engineering Analysis 2 through informal discussions and hands-on activities. Students enrolled in the course can attend the EA2 Hangout to work individually or in teams to design, build, and test […]

Mini-symposium on Advances in Terramechanics at EMI2019, June 18-21, Caltech

Consider submitting an abstract to our mini-symposium on Advances in Terramechanics as part of the EMI2019 conference running from June 18-21 this year at Caltech (http://emi2019.caltech.edu/). MS#42. Advances in Terramechanics: Soil-Machine Interaction, Mobility, Terrestrial Robotics, and Beyond. Co-organizer(s): Jim Hambleton, Northwestern University; Dan Negrut, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dan Goldman, Georgia Institute of Technology Description: This […]

Participating in EFRI C3 SoRo: Strong Soft Robots—Multiscale Burrowing and Inverse Design

We are delighted to be participating in the recently awarded NSF project entitled EFRI C3 SoRo: Strong Soft Robots—Multiscale Burrowing and Inverse Design, led by Prof. Tim Kowalewski in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Our focus in the $1.98M project is on fundamental aspects of robots capable of inferring soil […]

New Lab Video

Here is the full video from Tierney Acott’s visit to the SSI-SMI Lab.  You will see Jim, Zhefei, Sae, and Sam as well as eyebrow jiggles, geomechanics, and robots.  Many thanks to Tierney and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University.     Link: youtu.be/Tcn2jjhXH58

Jim and Zhefei Attend WCCM2018

Jim and Zhefei attended the 13th World Congress on Computational Mechanics in New York, where they also sampled the cuisine of northwestern China. Full details: Jin, Z., and Hambleton, J. P. (2018). Simulation of the cutting process in softening and hardening soils. 13th World Congress on Computational Mechanics, New York City, NY, July 22-27.