Melvin is one of the leading specialists in foundation testing, geotechnical instrumentation and structural monitoring using state of the art systems for loading, measuring and interpreting foundation behaviour. He has been directly involved in the development of new piling systems as well as optimising existing installation techniques. He has numerous patents to his name and has been instrumental in improving pile installation efficiency safety and productivity.

He has been managing static load testing projects for the last 20 years, developed a pile behaviour model which includes the Cemset and Timeset analysis methods to characterise pile behaviour in time and under load. These were the subjects of Melvin’s Doctoral thesis at Imperial College, London. He developed systems for performing the full scale static loading tests completely automatically with remote control and has managed and reported over 4000 traditional top-down and bi-directional O-cell static load tests.

Melvin is often consulted on the development of pile testing programmes specifically for large projects and has been involved directly in the design phase contributing to the optimisation of the pile/barrette geometry and total capacity. He has been an invited contributor to numerous committees writing national and International pile testing specifications.

Dr England is the Managing Director Fugro LOADTEST Ltd. a member of the Fugro Group of companies.