Jennifer Case

is Professor and Head of the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in the USA.  Prior to her appointment in this post she was a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town, where she retains an honorary appointment.  She completed postgraduate studies in the UK, Australia and South Africa. 

Her research on student learning in engineering education, curriculum reform, and comparative higher education has been widely published and well cited, with over 60 peer-reviewed journal publications and two monographs.  She was a founding member of the Centre for Engineering Education (CREE) and served twice as its Director, as well as being the founding president of the South African Society for Engineering Education (SASEE).

Jorge G. Zornberg

has over 35 years of experience in practice and research in geotechnical and geosynthetics engineering. His research focuses on transportation geotechnics, environmental geotechnics, geosynthetics, unsaturated soils, and expansive clays. As an engineering consultant, he has been an expert witness in litigation and forensic geotechnical cases. From 2010 to 2014, Prof. Zornberg served as president of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS). He has authored over 500 technical publications, written several book chapters, and been awarded three patents. Prof. Zornberg received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2024 Peck Lecture Award. He was also recognized with the Mercer Lecture, ASCE’s Croes Medal, the IGS Award, ASCE’s Collingwood Prize, as well as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awarded by the President of the United States. In 2019, the IGS established the “Zornberg Lecture,” an honorary lecture recognizing his contributions to the discipline of geosynthetics.

Marina Pantazidou

is an associate professor at the Civil Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Apart from university appointments in the US and Greece, her professional experience also includes work in hazardous waste consulting. Her research topics are drawn from environmental geotechnics and engineering education. She is author of 100 publications, 25 of which on geotechnical engineering education topics. She has been a guest editor for two special issues on geotechnical engineering education, one on case studies developed for geotechnical engineering instruction. She has been actively involved with the Hellenic Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (secretary general 2012-2015 and board member 2015 - )  and the ISSMGE Technical Committee TC306 on Geo-engineering Education (core member 2010-2013, vice chair 2013-2017, chair 2017 - ).  She chaired the ISSMGE Int. Conf. on Geotechnical Engineering Education GEE2020, (streamed from) Athens, Greece, June 23-25.

Francesca Ceccato

is a researcher at the University of Padua (Italy), where she currently teaches “Geological and Geotechnical Engineering” and “Numerical Modelling in Geomechanics” in the master programs of Water and Geological Risk Engineering and Civil Engineering. She has also been involved in the international teaching program Engineering for Africa within the cooperation between the University of Padua (Italy) and the Ecole National the Traveaux Publiqe (Camerun).

She is the secretary of TC103-Numerical methods of ISSMGE, a member of the Italian Geotechnical Association (AGI) and a member of the editorial board of Soils and Foundations.

Her main research topics include numerical modelling in geomechancis, with particular interest in the Material Point Method (MPM), assessment of river embankment vulnerability, soil characterization and the preservation of historical heritage, in particular the study of ancient foundations of the city of Venice. She is member of the core developer team of the open-source code Anura3D, based on MPM, and participate intensively in the activities of the Anura3D MPM research community.

Jean Sulem

Jean Sulem is Professor at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, and Research Director. He has been the Director of CERMES (2010-2020) and then the Director of Laboratoire Navier (2020-2024).

Jean Sulem is Past-President of the French Society of Rock Mechanics. Since 2020, he is Editor-in-chief of Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering (Springer).

His research interests are related to Bifurcation theory applied to stability and strain localisation analyses, Constitutive Modelling of geomaterials, Experimental Rock Mechanics, Thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior of geomaterials with applications to tunnelling, Energy-related rock engineering, Deep geological storage, Fault mechanics.

Jean Sulem has published more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals and several books among them: Vardoulakis, I. and Sulem, J. , 1995, Bifurcation Analysis in Geomechanics, Taylor & Francis, M. Panet & J. Sulem, 2022, Convergence-confinement method for tunnel design, Springer).

In 2018, Jean Sulem received the Vardoulakis lecture Award from the University of Minnesota and in 2022 the prestigious Science Achievement Award from the International Society of Rock Mechanics.

Alessandro Tarantino

is Professor of Experimental Geomechanics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His current research interests include the direct measurement of water tension in soils and plants, micromechanical behaviour of saturated and unsaturated clays, soil-plant-atmosphere interaction, and stability of natural and engineered slopes subjected to rainwater and floodwater infiltration. He has led major European consortium research projects including the Marie Curie European Training Network 'TERRE’ (Training Engineers and Researchers to Rethink geotechnical Engineering for a low carbon future, 2015-2019). He is co-editor of the books ‘Advanced Experimental Unsaturated Soil Mechanics’ (2005) and ‘Laboratory and Field Testing of Unsaturated Soils’ (2009). He has been keynote/theme lecturer at numerous International Conferences (the 8th International Conference on Unsaturated Soils in 2023 and the ICE Géotechnique Lecture in October 2023 the most recent ones).

Nicolas Utter

President of the board of the  École Nationale Supérieure de Géologie (Higher National School of Geology) in Nancy (France) since 2024, Nicolas Utter has devoted his entire career to the Soletanche Bachy group, where he is currently director of technical studies.

President emeritus of the French Committee for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, publishing editor of “Revue française de Géotechnique”, he is involved in improving knowledge and disseminating it, teaching, and standardization.  He led the organization of the scientific seminar "Coulomb 2023: A Geotechnical Tribute" to mark the 250th anniversary of the publication of the founding memoir of Charles-Augustin Coulomb.

Nicolas Utter teaches soil mechanics and geotechnics at the Higher School of Public Works (Cachan, France) since 15 years, and has been involved in higher education in geotechnics for almost twenty years, both in initial training and in continuing education.

Member of the French mirror group of EC7, he also chairs the technical commission of the SOFFONS (French union of deep foundations companies).