Earlier this year, Guy Houlsby, Professor of Civil Engineering and fellow of Brasenose College, delivered the prestigious Rankine Lecture. The Lecture, which is held annually, is organised by the British Geotechnical Association, and is named after William Rankine, a Scottish civil engineer, physicist and mathematician who pioneered work into the science of thermodynamics. He is best known in civil engineering for his theory for the earth pressure on retaining walls.
The lecture was held at Imperial College, London. During his talk Professor Houlsby used examples from offshore foundation design to illustrate where engineers need to address engineering problems in which phenomena interact in a way that cannot be separated, and where their interactions with other disciplines are important. He used examples including the installation and use of jack-up units and how the rapidly expanding offshore wind industry poses challenges for geotechnical engineers. The lecture is available to view here.
Professor Houlsby studied Engineering at the University of Cambridge in the 1970s, before moving into the engineering consultancy industry, and then back into academia to study for a PhD in Soil Mechanics at Cambridge. He has been a professor of Civil Engineering at Oxford, and a fellow at Brasenose College since 1991. In 2006 he published Principles of Hyperplasticity with Professor Alexander Puzrin.
Read more about studying Engineering at Brasenose College and Oxford.