Biography

Dr. Lyesse Laloui is chaired professor and Director of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL, Lausanne, where he developed a major research group in the areas of Soil Mechanics, Geoengineering and CO2 sequestration. He is also Director of the EPFL Civil Engineering Section as well as adjunct professor at Duke University, USA. He also is acting as advisory professor at Hohai University, China. His main research interests are in Geomechanics (Constitutive and numerical modelling of multiphysical coupling processes, laboratory advanced testing), and Environmental and Energy Sustainability (Nuclear waste underground storage, Petroleum Geomechanics, CO2 Geological Sequestration, Geothermal Energy). His most known contributions address the mechanics of unsaturated soils and shales, the thermo-mechanics of clays as well as the development of the thermo-active foundations technology, with over $21 million in research grants, awards and endowments to his credit. He is the recipient of an Advanced ERC (European Research Council) Grant for his project BIOGEOS (BIO-mediated GEO-material Strengthening). He wrote and edited 12 books and published over 300 peer reviewed papers. His work is cited more than 4300 times with an h-index of 31 (Scopus). He is the Editor in Chief of the International journal Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment. He was a guest editor for 6 journal special issues, and the Honorary Editor and Chairman of the Geotechnique Symposium in Print 2013 on Bio- and Chemo-mechanical Processes in Geotechnical Engineering. He is a member of the Editorial board of 7 international journals. He is co-founder of the International Joint Research Center for Energy Geotechnics in China. He served as the vice-chair of the ISSMGE TC101 on Experimental Geotechnics. He gave keynote and invited lectures at more than 30 leading international conferences. He also received the “Excellent Contributions Award” of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics in 2008, the “2012 Vardoulakis Lecture” from the University of Minnesota, the "12th G.A. Leonards Lecture" from the University of Purdue in 2014, the “2016 RM Quigley Award” from the Canadian Geotechnical Society, and the 30th Roberval Award at the French Academy of Science in 2018. He has been involved as an expert in several international projects and acts as a consultant in civil, geotechnical and geothermal engineering, including legal and arbitration cases. He acted as the Chair of the Evaluation Panel of Civil and Geological Engineering R&D Units of Portugal. The patented “Geosynthetic element for soil bio-improvement” is currently being developed in the context of the start-up MeduSoil. He is also developing another start-up (GEOEG) in the area of Energy Geostructures.

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