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.

Proposed and implemented changes in attitude, organization and scale for geotechnical engineering education: The teacher as a go-between and TC306 as a knowledge broker

This lecture campaigns for solutions that overcome obstacles to the production of quality teaching materials for engineering education, proposes a framework for their production, and describes example applications in geotechnical engineering. 

The perspective of the lecture is content-based, i.e. not method-based. This perspective calls for two fundamental changes in attitude. First, shedding the assumption that geotechnical engineering instructors have more than enough suitable teaching materials to choose from. Second, adopting in education the practice of peer review, i.e. doing education as we do research. 

For organizing the production of teaching materials, the literature of education offers the concept of pedagogical content knowledge, which first requires acknowledgement that indeed there exists a distinct body of knowledge, part of which resides unrecorded in the minds of the teachers. Pedagogical knowledge of content focuses on how content is perceived by both instructors and students and on how to guide understanding of content towards generative perceptions and away from misinterpretations. The lecture describes small-scale teaching materials developed within this framework for the topic of soil compaction. 

Developing teaching materials and peer review take significant time; without the incentives of research (funding and prestige), it can be done by reducing the scale of the undertaking and of personal involvement. Some progress has already been made by TC306, the technical committee on geo-engineering education, with contributions provided by its members and obtained through reaching out. Collectively, the advocated changes transform the teacher into a go-between who bridges experience levels, connects ideas, and links education with both research and professional practice. By fostering collaboration and serving as a conduit for sharing and feedback, TC306 acts as a knowledge broker.

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.

Teaching numerical methods or teaching with numerical methods?

This lecture presents some of the results of a collaboration between TC103 (numerical methods) and TC306 (geoengineering education) of ISSMGE with the objective of producing high quality educational material to be shared with educators in form of figures or videos. The project stems from the idea that figures, charts and videos obtained with the use of numerical tools can enrich teaching of key concepts of geomechanics in introductory courses. Examples are visual resources obtained using DEM to illustrate micro-phenomena and the particulate nature of soils and its consequences, or using FEM/FDM to illustrate macro-phenomena such as stresses under loaded areas or bearing capacity of foundation. Figures are submitted with metadata useful to guide the use of the material even by educators that are not expert in numerical methods. However, this raises a fundamental question: how detailed should be student’s (and educator’s) knowledge on numerical methods to fully understand (and use) the material?  This paper discusses this issue showing how the same material, if correctly prepared, can be used with different purposes both in basic and advanced courses. Pilot examples are illustrated with specific emphasis on stress under loaded areas.

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).

Undergraduate teaching of Unsaturated Soil Mechanics: building on fundamental physical mechanisms to pave the way for geotechnical analyses

(accompanying paper by Alessia Amabile & Alessandro Tarantino)

Unsaturated soil mechanics is typically not included in traditional geotechnical engineering curricula at undergraduate level and the design and development of specific modules is usually left to the initiative of individual academics, very often already involved in unsaturated soil mechanics’ research. Due to the lack of advanced testing equipment for unsaturated soils, even when principles of unsaturated soil mechanics are added to the curriculum, they typically lack the laboratory component usually included in traditional geotechnical engineering courses. The lecture presents an innovative approach to teach unsaturated soil mechanics starting from elementary physical mechanisms. One of the distinctive features of this approach is using real-time, small-scale experiments to provide a visual demonstration of key micromechanisms of unsaturated soil mechanics, such as surface tension and capillary forces. This offers the opportunity to enhance students’ engagement and at the same time help them develop a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of unsaturated soil mechanics by presenting them in a non-axiomatic fashion. The proposed approach also focuses on providing numerical tools that enable students to carry out simple, introductory analyses of unsaturated geostructures. In this approach, content is introduced by building upon concepts and methodologies that are typically familiar to undergraduate students, making it accessible and easy to implement across different universities.

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).