Professors Jacobsz and Kearsley, working in collaboration with Dr Daniel Cumming-Potvin and Dr Johan Wesseloo of the Australian Centre of Geomechanics at the University of Western Australia in Perth, received the Gold Medal of the Southern African Institution of Mining and Metallurgy for their paper entitled 'Fracture banding in caving mines'.  The paper describes the results of physical model tests carried out in the Department's geotechnical centrifuge as part of the PhD research of Dr Cumming-Potvin.  It was the first time that cave mining, a mining technique applied at mines such as Cullinan, was modelled in a geotechnical centrifuge.