Guest Lecturers

Shamsher Prakash Keynote lecture by: W.D. Liam Finn, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus University of British Columbia President, Pan-American Engineering and Computing

 W. D. Liam Finn graduated from the National University of Ireland in 1954 with a B.Eng. in Civil Engineering. He got his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1957 and 1960 respectively. He started the first program of geotechnical earthquake engineering in Canada at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver where he pioneered the development of dynamic effective stress analysis with the program DESRA in 1975. He was Head of Civil Engineering and Dean of Applied Science at UBC. In 1999, he was appointed as the first Anabuki Professor of Foundation Geodynamics at Kagawa University, Takamatsu, Japan. He is an Honorary International Member of the Japanese Geotechnical Society and the Chinese Society of Soil Dynamics, PRC. He is also an Honorary Professor of the Metallurgical Institute in Beijing. He was Editor of the International Journal of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. He served as Chairman of ISSMGE/TC-4 on Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering. Finn’s main research interest is geotechnical earthquake engineering with particular interest in liquefaction, seismic response of sites and earth structures, seismic safety evaluation of dams, seismic response of pile foundations and seismic risk. He has published over 350 papers on these topics and has won several awards including the Legget Medal, the highest honor from the Canadian Geotechnical Society, the H. B.Seed medal from ASCE and the Housner medal from EERI for his contributions to Earthquake Engineering. Finn consults internationally especially on the seismic safety of dams and liquefaction problems.

Invited Speaker Ahmed-Waeil Elgamal, Ph.D. Professor, Geotechnical Engineering, Department of Structural Engineering Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Jacobs School of Engineering University of California - San Diego

‌Ahmed Elgamal is a Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Currently, he is serving as the School of Engineering Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. Earlier, he chaired the Department of Structural Engineering (2003-2007). He received his PhD in 1985 from Princeton University. In 1997, he joined UCSD after a Post-doctoral appointment at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), and Faculty positions at RPI and Columbia University in New York.

 His areas of research interest include liquefaction and effects on the built environment, large-scale soil-structure experimental and computational simulation, sustainability in Geomechanics, Information Technology (IT) applications, and system-identification procedures. He is author and co-author of over 300 Technical Publications, and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. Over the years, he has consulted and provided professional services in the general areas of Geomechanics and Geotechnical Engineering for a number of national and international organizations.

Afternoon Sessions by:

Ronaldo Luna, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, D.GE -  Saint Louis University
Dr. Guney Olgun, Ph.D. - Missouri S&T
Dr. Brent Rosenbald, Ph.D. - University of Missouri