ABOUT SPEAKERS
Keynote Speakers
Professor Richard J. Bathurst, Ph.D., FRSC, FEIC, FCAE, FCSCE, M.ASCE
Prof. Richard J. Bathurst
Dr. Bathurst is Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada where he has taught since 1980 and holds a cross-appointment at Queen’s University. He is a past-President of the Engineering Institute of Canada, Canadian Geotechnical Society, International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) and the North American Geosynthetics Society.
Dr. Bathurst has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal papers and 250 other contributions. 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, new test methods and the development of transparent granular soil surrogates for geotechnical testing. Dr. Bathurst’s current research activities are focused on 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, and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) calibration of soil structures.
Dr. Bathurst has served on committees of the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code and the National Building Code of Canada. He has received national and international awards for his technical contributions and has been invited speaker and keynote lecturer at learned society conferences and symposia on many occasions. Dr. Bathurst is Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed technical journal Geosynthetics International and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Geomechanics, and Geotextiles and Geomembranes. He is Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Institute of Canada and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. Dr. Bathurst was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017, which is the highest academic honour in Canada. The “Richard Bathurst Lecture” was recently announced by the IGS in recognition of his lifetime contributions to the development of geosynthetic soil reinforcement technologies and the mission of the IGS. The lecture will be delivered at the quadrennial International Geosynthetics Conferences.