Keynote Lecture

June 22 | 9:10 AM - 09:55 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

Seismic Risk Assessment for Earth Slopes and Dams
Dr. Ellen Rathje, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Dr. Ellen M. Rathje is the Janet S. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), and Senior Research Scientist at the UT Bureau of Economic Geology. She has expertise in the areas of geotechnical earthquake engineering, engineering seismology, induced seismicity, field reconnaissance after earthquakes, and remote sensing. Dr. Rathje is the Principal Investigator for the DesignSafe-ci.org cyberinfrastructure for the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). She has been honored with various research awards, including the 2018 William B. Joyner Lecture Award from the Seismological Society of America and the 2010 Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers. She was elected Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2016.

Plenary Lecture

June 22 | 9:55 AM - 10:55 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

TBA
Dr. Nemkumar Banthia, University of British Columbia, Canada

N/A

Keynote Lecture

June 22 | 10:55 AM - 11:40 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

In Situ Bioremediation of Contaminated Soil and Ground Water; Lab Optimization Leads to Functional Combinations at Field Sites
Dr. Martin Romantschuk University of Helsinki, Finland

Prof. Martin Romantschuk received his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1987. He is Professor of Environmental Biotechnology at University of Helsinki and now leads a research group of 8 scientists. The research deals with both basic and applied aspects of environmental biotechnology. One main research topic is soil bioremediation with particular emphasis on technology used in situ. He has supervised 26 PhD theses and published over 130 scientific articles in international scientific periodicals and a number of other scientific publications and book chapters. His WoS H-index is 36. He is a member of the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

Session

June 22 | 11:45 AM - 12:30 PM | Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

Geotechnical Infrastructure I

Session

June 22 | 12:35 AM- 01:20 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

Geoenvironmental Research

Session

June 22 | 1:20 PM - 1:30 PM | Session Chair: Ikrema Abdalla Hassan, Taibah University, Saudi Arabia

Biotechnology and Environment

Keynote Lecture

June 22 | 01:50 PM - 02:35 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

The Behaviour of a Structure within a Cluster of Structures in Earthquakes
Dr. Nawawi Chouw, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Dr Nawawi CHOUW is an Associate Professor and was Director of the University of Auckland Centre for Earthquake Engineering Research (2011-2017). Prior to joining the University of Auckland, he worked at universities in Germany, Japan and Australia. He gained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. He has been awarded twice the Gledden Fellowship of the University of Western Australia, Fritz-Peter-Mueller Prize of the Technical University of Karlsruhe, Germany, the Best Research Award of Chugoku Denryoku Research Foundation, Japan, and received twice recognition for excellence in research supervision from Chinese Scholarship Council. He was invited by China Ministry of Education, NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Qatar Science Foundation, SA National Research Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service and by other European Research Institutions to assess applications and international standing of colleagues. He was also invited to teach at several universities in Europe, China and Japan. He was Guest Editor of a number of journals, e.g., Protective Structures, Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering. He is editor of the international journal of Materials, Shock and Vibration and an associate editor of Frontiers in Build Environment – Earthquake Engineering and is an editorial board member of several international journals. He was a visiting and guest professor at several universities in China, Germany, Canada, Australia, Serbia, Macedonia and Japan.

Keynote Lecture

June 22 | 02:35 PM - 03:20 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Smaller Than Expected Benefit of COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Air Quality
Dr. Zongbo Shi, University of Birmingham, UK

Zongbo Shi received his PhD from China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing). He worked in Tsinghua University, Prefectural University and University of Leeds as a research fellow before joining the University of Birmingham. He is currently a profess of Atmospheric Biogeochemistry. His group focuses on Sources and emissions of chemical substances to the atmosphere, physical and chemical transformation of aerosol particles and their constituents in the atmosphere, and the interaction of atmospheric chemistry with biogeochemistry of ecosystems.

Session

June 22 | 3:25 PM - 04:25 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal & Dr. Rajeshwar Goodary, Universite des Mascareignes, Mauritius

Composites and Construction

Session

June 22 | 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Soil Pollution and Treatment

Plenary Lecture

June 23 | 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Superhydrophobic and Oleophilic Polymeric Open Cellular Foams for Efficient Oil/Water Separation Plenary Abstract
Dr. Chul B. Park, University of Toronto, Canada

Prof Chul Park received his PhD from MIT in 1993. He is Distinguished Professor of Microcellular Engineered Plastics at University of Toronto. He is also the NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair in Multi-Functional Graphene-Based Polymer Nanocomposites and Foams. He has an international recognition in polymer foam area. He has published more than 1400 papers, including over 400 journal papers and four books with 75 Scopus H-index. Prof Park serves as Editor-in-Chief for Journal of Cellular Plastics. He has been inducted into 5 academies as an Academician Fellow. He is also a fellow of 5 other professional societies including Society of Plastics Engineers.

Keynote Lecture

June 23 | 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Dr. Dante Fratta, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Dante Fratta graduated with a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1999. He is currently a faculty member in Geological Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches Soil Mechanics, Applied Geophysics, and advanced courses in Wave Propagation in Geomaterials and Engineering Behavior of Soils. Dante's research interests include Near Surface Geophysics and Experimental Geotechnical Engineering. For the last ten years, Dante has been collecting, analyzing, and interpreting distributed optic sensing data to monitor the near subsurface.

Keynote Lecture

June 23 | 10:45 AM - 11:30 AM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

TBA
Dr. Brian Uy, University of Sydney, Australia

TBA

Session

June 23 | 11:35 AM - 12:25 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Geotechnical Infrastructure II

Session

June 23 | 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada and Dr. Joaquim Barros, University of Minho, Portugal

Soil and Rock Mechanics and Characterization

Keynote Lecture

June 23 | 2:05 PM - 2:50 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

Characterization and Mechanism Analysis of Alkali-Silica Reaction in Cementitious Materials
Dr. Qingli Dai, Michigan Technological University, USA

Dr. Qingli Dai is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Michigan Tech. Dr. Dai’s primary professional and scholarly contributions have dealt with material design, characterization, test and analysis for sustainable civil infrastructure applications. She has published over 160 technical papers including about 100 journal articles and other 60+ conference papers. Dr. Dai has been a Principle Investigator of several research projects funded by US National Science Foundation and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Other sponsors of her research program include State Department of Transportation and Michigan Space Grant Consortium. Dr. Dai received 2017 Best Paper Award for the ASCE Journal of Aerospace Engineering. Dr. Dai is an associate editor for ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering since November 2011. She is a member of ASCE granular material committee, bitumen committee, pavement committee, and geophysics committee. She is also a member of ACI committee 201,236 and 555.

Keynote Lecture

June 23 | 2:50 PM - 3:35 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

From Physical Measurements to Design Codes for MSE Walls
Dr. Richard J. Bathurst, Royal Military College of Canada, Canada

Dr. Bathurst (P. Eng., Ph.D., FRSC, FEIC, FCAE) is Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada where he has taught since 1980. He is a Past-President of the Engineering Institute of Canada, the Canadian Geotechnical Society (CGS) and the International Geosynthetics Society. Dr. Bathurst has authored or co-authored more than 450 papers in referred journals, conference proceedings and research monographs. 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 and systems, new test methods and the development of transparent granular soil surrogates for geotechnical laboratory-scale testing.

Dr. Bathurst’s primary research activities are focused on the use of 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, load and resistance factor design (LRFD) calibration of soil-structures, and LRFD code development.

Dr. Bathurst is editor of the peer-reviewed technical journal Geosynthetics International, published by the Institute of Civil Engineers in the UK, and associate editor of the International Journal of Geomechanics published by the ASCE.

Session

June 23 | 3:40 PM - 04:25 PM | Session Chair: Dr. Hany El Naggar, Dalhousie University, Canada

Modelling and Simulation

Session

June 23 | 4:25 PM - 04:45 PM | Session Chair: Ikrema Abdalla Hassan, Taibah University, Saudi Arabia

Air Pollution and Treatment

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