Title announced for the 65th Rankine Lecture by Professor Charles Ng
For the 65th Rankine Lecture Professor Charles Ng of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology will present on ‘Eco_Geotechnics for safety and human sustainability: from the Earth to the Moon’s exploration’.
The lecture will be held in London on 24th March 2027.
Please note that owing to refurbishment works at the Great Hall, Imperial College London, the venue for this year’s lecture has been changed to Ondaatje Lecture Theatre at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), South Kensington, London.
Full details of the event can be found HERE.
The Rankine Dinner will be held after the lecture. The call for tickets for the dinner will be announced nearer the event. The dinner will be held at the usual venue at Imperial College, which is about a 5-minute walk from the RGS. Please note the dinner is usually heavily oversubscribed.
Synopsis
As two of the most widespread natural components of Earth’s land surface, soils and plants form the foundation of human civilisation. Yet, soil-plant-atmosphere-water (SPAW) interactions have long driven catastrophic hazards such as landslides, debris flows, and wildfires. Mitigating these threats while harnessing the benefits of soil-plant systems for human sustainability remains a major challenge, particularly under a changing climate.
In this Lecture, a new inter-disciplinary field termed Ecological Geotechnics (Eco-Geotechnics) will be proposed. Integrating state-dependent unsaturated soil mechanics with botany, a newly developed theory governing coupled SPAWs will be introduced. Using this new theory, the mechanisms of complex SPAW and multiple engineering applications of vegetated soil are investigated under various climatic conditions such as extreme rainstorms and thermal cycles. Explorations and insights from physical modelling and numerical simulations of diverse SPAW interactions will be presented across multiple domains. Apart from a forensic investigation of a recent fatal slope failure claiming 52 lives, these explorations demonstrate the effects of root architecture on induced soil suction and how vegetation stabilises soil slopes and enhances the performance of landfill covers under extreme climates. Finally, broader applications will be explored, including improving the yield and quality of medicinal herbal plants and assisting sustainable crop cultivation under lunar gravity in preparation for possible human habitation on the Moon in the near future.
Speaker biography
Professor Charles Wang-Wai Ng is the CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability and Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering, and was the President of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering between 2017 and 2022.
Professor Ng earned his PhD from the University of Bristol in 1993 and carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, where he was subsequently elected an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College. He joined HKUST as an Assistant Professor in 1995 and rose through the ranks to become Chair Professor in 2011.
Professor Ng is interested in unsaturated soil mechanics, eco-geotechnics, debris flow mitigation, slope stability, and soil–structure interaction engineering. Professor Ng has published approximately 500 SCI-indexed journal articles, achieving an H-index of 109 (Google scholar) with over 40,400 citations.
Professor Ng has received some international awards, including the 2025 Telford Gold Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers. He also earned the 2025 Donald Stanley Award (for best paper in environmental engineering) from the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, the 2025 Scott Sloan Paper Award (for highest-cited paper in the previous five years) from Computers and Geotechnics, a Gold+ medal with Congratulations from the Jury at the International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva, the R. M. Quigley Award from the Canadian Geotechnical Society four times for best papers published in Canadian Geotechnical Journal (CGJ), in 2023, 2016, 2012 and 2007 – as well as the CGS 2022 Fredlund Award (for highest-cited paper published in CGJ in the previous five years), and the 2022 Varnes Medal from the International Consortium on Landslides.
Moreover, in Chinese mainland, Professor Ng received the 2022 Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, the 2020 National Natural Science Award and the 2015 Scientific Technological Advancement Award.
