A paper that Tingfa contributed to and led by Dr Matteo Ciantia (University of Dundee), in conjunction with Professors Marcos Arroyo and Antonio Gens (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC) and Professor Catherine O'Sullivan (Imperial College London), was awarded “75th Géotechnique Anniversary Early Career Award (insightful paper on Soil micromechanics published in the decade 2013-2023). The paper is entitled “Grading evolution and critical state in a discrete numerical model of Fontainebleau sand” and is published in Géotechnique, 2019, 69(1): 1-15.