The award was presented late last month in Salt Lake City, Utah by the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration.

The Syd S Peng Ground Control in Mining Award is presented annually to recognise outstanding professionals who have demonstrated insight and understanding of ground control issues by developing concepts, theories or technologies that have been adopted by the mining community or the successful implementation of ground control designs or practices.

Gale is the third recipient of the award and the first Australian.

Gale received the award in recognition of his "unrivalled ability to use critical mechanics, observation, field measurements and numerical models to understand complex ground control issues".

Some of the criteria taken into consideration by the selection committee included publication record in the field of ground control in mining; acceptance of research findings by the mining industry in the form of a case study or studies; and demonstrated recognition of previous activities in the field of mining engineering related to ground control issues.

Gale was born in Gosford and attended Newcastle University where he obtained a Bachelor of Science. He attained a PhD in 1982 in the field of stress analysis and deformation modes within a geological rock mass.

During 1982-86 Gale worked with the CSIRO, primarily in the Division of Geomechanics, where he applied and further developed his background knowledge in stress related rock deformation modes around underground coal mine roadways and extraction panels.

The application and development of this work, in collaboration with others, highlighted the inter-relationship of horizontal stress direction and roadway direction in the type and location of rock damage around the mine roadways.

This work was applied to rock bolting methods and the concept of directional mining to optimise the stability and development rates for gateroads and longwall panels.

From 1986 to 1989 he was manager of the strata control group within Australian Coal Industry Research Laboratories (ACIRL) and from 1989 was a founding member of a consulting and research company, SCT in Wollongong.

He and his co-workers at SCT have continued consulting and research in the field of rock mechanics applied to underground mining.

During this period the application of computer simulation of the rock failure mechanics to the understanding of problems and development of solutions in mining has emerged. The approach used was to include the detail of the geology within the simulations and compare the response with observed behaviour and measured cases.

This multi-faceted approach has been found to be successful and is applied to roadway reinforcement design, pillar design, longwall support design, together with the subsidence and hydrological implications of strata caving and fracture about longwall panels.

SCT employs 17 people and in addition to the head office in Wollongong has offices located in Mackay, Bendigo and Beijing.