MSc graduate 2011 - Vasiliki Tsaparli

Vasiliki (Vasia) Tsaparli attended Imperial College London in 2010 where she studied the MSc course in Soil Mechanics and won the ‘Buro Happold’ award.

Looking back at it Vasia believes that, through this course, she strongly enhanced her technical, engineering, project management and interpersonal and group work skills, with the course playing a ‘key’ role in her entrance to the professional world of geotechnical engineering.

According to her, the interesting people that she met and the lifetime friends that she made there have also been one of the most important outcomes of that year.
Prior to that, she completed her 5 year undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, with a specialisation in Structural Engineering. During her undergraduate studies she also won three awards for excellence in achievement in Mathematics.

Immediately after her graduation from Imperial College in October 2011 she joined Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG) where she worked as a geotechnical engineer for two years. During her time at GCG she was involved in different types of projects of larger or smaller scale, and was the project manager in a number of them. Types of projects included: impact assessment of basement construction on adjacent buildings and tunnels with regard to ground movements; desk studies; hydrogeological reports; pile design and settlement calculations; site investigation specification; geotechnical interpretive reports of site investigations; subsidence claims.

From February 2012 to September 2012 Vasia was seconded at Crossrail, the biggest engineering project in Europe, where she worked with Keller Bam Ritchies JV (KBR) as a shift engineer on contract ‘C300/C410: Compensation Grouting’.

Over this period she was in charge of supervising the drilling and grouting activities, managing the site crews and preparing drilling and grouting instructions. She also trained a number of shift engineers on ‘pre-treatment’ grouting, mentoring a number of them.

In October 2013, Vasia returned to the Geotechnics section of Imperial College London as a PhD candidate to work on the numerical modelling of earthquake-induced liquefaction, while in October 2017 she successfully defended her PhD thesis. Since then, she has been working as a Research Associate in the Petroleum Engineering & Rock Mechanics Group of the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College London, looking at the numerical modelling of flow and fractures in rocks.

Vasia is a graduate member of the Institute of Civil Engineering (ICE), a full member of the Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE), a member of the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics (SECED), a member of the Seismological Society of America (SSA) and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).