The British Geotechnical Association (BGA) is the principal
association for geotechnical engineers in the United Kingdom.

The 62nd Rankine Lecture

BGA Meeting
  • 13.03.2024
  • 17:30 - 19:30
  • The Great Hall, Sherfield Building, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, SW7 2AZ
  • Event Type: BGA Meeting
  • Download to Calendar
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The 62nd Rankine Lecture: Geotechnical Engineering for a Sustainable Society

by

Professor Lidija Zdravković of Imperial College London

13th Mar 2024 17:30 hours

The Great Hall, Sherfield Building, Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, SW7 2AZ

Event Information

This will be held as an in-person event and will also be webcast live.

Photographs may be taken at the event and used for BGA promotional purposes; if you have any objections please contact the BGA via email.

Attending the lecture

If you plan to attend the Lecture in person, please note:

  • Advance booking is not required.
  • Tea, coffee and biscuits will be served between 4:00-5:15 pm.

You are asked:

  • To refrain from entering the Theatres before 4.45 pm
  • Not to reserve seats for absent colleagues
  • Kindly remain in your place once you have entered the Great Hall or Clore Lecture theatre
  • Please note that the Relay to the overflow Clore Lecture theatre will be the same as the live streaming to the YouTube Channel (see below).

Watching the lecture on line

If you plan to watch the lecture online:

The Lecture will be streamed live via YouTube via this LINK.

The Rankine Lecture

The Rankine Lecture is widely viewed as the most prestigious of the invited lectures in geotechnics. It commemorates William John Macquorn Rankine, Professor of Civil Engineering at Glasgow University, who was one of the first engineers in the UK to make a significant contribution to soil mechanics. He is best known for his theory for the earth pressure on retaining walls.

The Rankine Dinner will be held after the lecture. The call for tickets for the dinner is now open and can be found HERE. Please note the dinner is usually heavily oversubscribed.

This event is free to attend.

Synopsis

It is very evident today that geotechnical engineering is faced with a range of challenges of increasing complexity and scope. Efforts have been made in industry and in academia to address some of these challenges, contributing to the development of a current and future safe, sustainable and resilient society. This Rankine Lecture focusses on the development of robust predictive tools to underpin the geotechnical design concerned with the lifecycle assessment of a range of infrastructure, illustrated by specific examples from the Speaker’s research. The key for these developments is in integrating, in a consistent manner, ground characterisation with rigorous computational analysis and validation through field monitoring. The lecture has several parts, focusing on research that supports sustainable life extension of aging infrastructure, under the conditions of climate change-induced weather patterns; research that is impacting offshore wind turbine foundation design in the development of renewable energy sources; and environmental impacts of thermal and chemical perturbations in the ground on geotechnical infrastructure.

Speaker Biography

Lidija Zdravković is Professor of Computational Geomechanics at Imperial College London, where she has been an academic staff member since 1996, becoming full professor in 2013. She has been Head of the Geotechnics division in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department since 2014. Her research integrates soil characterisation and numerical modelling to assess geotechnical infrastructure, climate change impact, offshore foundations, energy geostructures and nuclear waste disposal, recently expanding her interests to data science and machine learning. She has consulted on a number of major infrastructure projects and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She has published over 250 technical papers and has been awarded prizes from BGA and ICE and the 2019 Imperial College President’s Medal for Excellence in Education. She takes on the role of Géotechnique Editor-in-Chief from January 2024.

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Refreshment Details

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be served between 4:00-5:15 pm

Lecture theatre doors open at 4:45 pm

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