2025 Tom Barton Award winner announced

Kathy Ziwei Wen, a geotechnical project engineer from Geotechnologies Intelligence, has won the 2025 Tom Barton Award at the ICE Awards. 

Named in honour of GIRI's late founding director Tom Barton, the award recognises engineering and construction professionals who have demonstrated excellence in implementing initiatives to improve quality, productivity, safety and sustainability by eliminating error. Kathy won the award for her innovative work to address significant errors in traditional grout consumption estimates during offshore pile installations for an offshore wind farm project.

Kathy led a cross-disciplinary collaboration between statisticians, geotechnical engineers, and project managers to develop a method of more accurately calculating grout use that would eliminate the costly delays, wasteful material use, and increased environmental impact caused by underestimations of consumption of up to 200%.

Kathy and her team developed a Bayesian ordinal regression model to estimate grout overconsumption risk at specific pile locations. This improved prediction accuracy by 23%, identified high-risk locations, reduced delays by optimising installation sequencing, and saved an estimated 500-1,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

The model also led to significant savings in personnel expenses, vessel usage, additional materials and equipment, weather-related idle time, penalties for project delays, and logistical and coordination overheads. 

"Winning this award is incredibly motivating, and provides momentum to keep pursuing innovative solutions to minimise errors in civil engineering," said Kathy. "Often there’s a block to new ideas or a reluctance to engage, so having this work recognised is both encouraging and validating."

Tom Barton's wife Mary presented the award to Kathy at the ICE Awards ceremony on 3 July.