The 18th annual GFWA Prize for final year undergraduate projects in geomechanics at universities in Western Australia was held on 12 October 2010 at Engineers Australia in Perth. This year saw the presentation by Ryan Colcott from UWA (Better prediction of shallow foundation settlement on sand), Jarrad Coffey from Curtin University (Towards Mechanistic structural pavement design for haul roads) and Ben Holland also from UWA (Torsional loading of subsea shallow foundations). Ryan won chosen as the winner of this year’s competition by the judges, Babak Hamidi from GFWA, Marc Woodward from Advanced Geomechanics and Fiona Chow from Worley Parsons, and Jarrad was chosen as the best presenter by the audience. The prizes were presented by Rob Simpson, the managing director of GFWA.