Keynote Speakers

Dr. Richard J. Bathurst
Royal Military College of Canada, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Dr. Bathurst (P. Eng., Ph.D., FRSC, FEIC, FCAE) is Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada where he has taught since 1980. He is a Past-President of the Engineering Institute of Canada, the Canadian Geotechnical Society (CGS) and the International Geosynthetics Society. Dr. Bathurst has authored or co-authored more than 450 papers in referred journals, conference proceedings and research monographs. He has made contributions in the areas of micromechanics of granular soils, railway ballast and track dynamics, pavements, unsaturated soil-geotextile behaviour, constitutive modelling of geosynthetic soil reinforcement materials and systems, new test methods and the development of transparent granular soil surrogates for geotechnical laboratory-scale testing. Dr. Bathurst’s primary research activities are focused on the use of geosynthetic and metallic reinforcement in earth retaining wall systems, numerical modelling, seismic performance and design of these systems, probabilistic design of reinforced and unreinforced soil structures, reliability-based design, load and resistance factor design (LRFD) calibration of soil-structures, and LRFD code development. Dr. Bathurst is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed technical journal Geosynthetics International, published by the Institute of Civil Engineers in the UK, and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Geomechanics published by the ASCE, and Geotextiles and Geomembranes published by Elsevier.

Topic of Keynote: Reliability and LRFD calibration for internal stability limit states for MSE Walls
Keynote Abstract

Dr. Dipanjan Basu
University of Waterloo, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Dr. DIPANJAN BASU is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo (UW) (Canada). He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut (USA) before joining UW. Dr. Basu obtained his academic degrees from Purdue University (USA), Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (India), and Jadavpur University (India). He is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario in Canada, and a Chartered Engineer and Professional Engineer in India. He is a member of several learned societies in USA, Canada, and India.

Dr. Basu has broad research and teaching interests that include Foundations and Soil Structure Interaction, Energy Geotechnics, Sustainability and Resilience Quantification in Geotechnical Engineering, Soil Constitutive Modeling, Blast Analysis of Geo-structures, Probabilistic Analysis, Soil Dynamics, and Ground Improvement. He has close to 150 peer reviewed publications with more than 60 refereed articles in reputed journals. Dr. Basu has delivered several keynotes and invited lectures in the U.S.A., Canada, South Africa, Argentina, India, China, and Kazakhstan. He has taught professional and university short courses in the U.S.A., South Africa, India, and Ethiopia.

Dr. Basu is a member of Tau Beta Pi, and a recipient of the Telford Premium Award (U.K.), IGS-P.J. Rao-Y.R. Phill Biennial Award 2020 (India), Fugro Fellowship (U.S.A.), ExCEEd Teaching Fellowship (U.S.A.), and Prof. S. Neogi Award (India), among other accolades. He is a fellow of the Indian Geotechnical Society and the Institution of Engineers (India). He is a past chair of the Soil Mechanics and Foundations division of the Canadian Geotechnical Society (CGS). He is also a past chair of the ISSMGE and ASCE-GI technical committees on Sustainability in Geotechnical Engineering, and vice-chair of the CGS technical committee on Sustainable Geotechnics. Dr. Basu served as an Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and was in the editorial board of Proceedings of the ICE – Geotechnical Engineering.

Topic of Keynote: Sustainable Geotechnical Engineering - A Research Perspective
Keynote Abstract

Dr. Hesham El Naggar
Western University, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Dr. El Naggar is a Distinguished University Professor of Western University, Canada. He is Editor-In-Chief of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering and past Associate Editor of the Canadian Geotechnical Journal. He published more than 450 technical papers/book chapters on foundations, soil-structure interaction and geotechnical earthquake engineering; and consulted on major projects worldwide. He is the main developer of software DYNA6 used worldwide for design of foundations for dynamic loads. He received numerous awards including: Geosynthetics, Stermac, Meyerhof, Canadian Geotechnical Colloquium Speaker, Western University Distinguished Professorship, Faculty Scholar Award, Outstanding Teaching, and Research Excellence Awards as well as the 2015 Ontario Professional Engineers Medal for Engineering Research & Development. He is an elected Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineers, Engineering Institute of Canada and the American Society for Civil Engineers.

Topic of Keynote: Seismic Performance of Helical Piles
Keynote Abstract

Dr. David Toll
Durham University, UK
Keynote Speaker

David Toll is Professor of Engineering and Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University. He is Chair of the British Geotechnical Association and has just completed an 8-year term as Chair of the Technical Committee on Unsaturated Soils of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He has been carrying out research into geo-hazards related to unsaturated and tropical soils for over 35 years. The main applications of his research are in the impacts of climate change on infrastructure slopes, rainfall-induced landslides and use of naturally occurring materials in road construction. He is Principal Investigator on major grants relating to climate adaptation: CACTUS (£1.76M) and Transport Africa (£1.1M) and Co-Investigator on the ACHILLES programme grant (£4.8M). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Nature journal, Geotechnical & Geological Engineering and has served as a member of the Editorial Boards for Géotechnique and Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology.

Topic of Keynote: Protecting Geo-Infrastructure from Climate Change
Keynote Abstract