This talk was delivered by Professor A.P.S. Selvaduraj, who is a William Scott Professor and James McGill Professor attached to the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. This talk was conducted on 30th August 2017 at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering, Kilinochchi premises, University of Jaffna. It was very interesting talk attended by number of Industry Engineers together with the academic staff and students of the Faculty.
Biography of the resource person:
Dr. A.P.S. Selvadurai is currently William Scott Professor and James McGill Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Mechanics from the University of Nottingham, under the tutelage of the eminent continuum mechanicist the late Professor A.J.M. Spencer FRS, for research in the area of “Non-linear Elasticity” and in 1986 the D.Sc. in Theoretical Mechanics for research into “Mathematical Modelling of Problems in Geomechanics and Elastomechanics”. He joined the Department of Civil Engineering at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada in 1975 as Assistant Professor, became Professor in 1981 and Head of the Department from 1982 to 1991. In 1993, he was invited by McGill University to become Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, a position he held till 1997. He has held Visiting Professorships at the The University of Nottingham – U.K, Universität Stuttgart, Germany, The Laboratoire 3S-R, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France; The Department of Civil Engineering, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand; The Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China; The School of Civil Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Departement de Genie Civil, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, The Department of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of the Technical University Delft, The Netherlands and The Department of Civil Engineering, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In 1998, Dr. Selvadurai received the Humboldt Forschungspreis (Humboldt Foundation of Germany), given to internationally acclaimed scientists and engineers. In 2000, he became the first civil engineer to be awarded the Killam Research Fellowship Canada Council for the Arts, one of Canada’s most distinguished research awards. In 2001 he was awarded the Inaugural John Booker Medal International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics-IACMAG. In 2003 he received the prestigious Max Planck Forschungspreis in the Engineering Sciences. In 2007, he was awarded the Killam Prize in Engineering from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Gold Medal of the Canadian Congresses of Applied Mechanics. In 2008 he received the IACMAG Medal for Outstanding Accomplishments in Geomechanics. In 2010, he was awarded the ALERT Research Medal, by the Alliance of Laboratories in Europe for Research and Technology. In 2013, he was awarded the Eric Reissner Medal of the ICCES and the Maurice A. Biot Medal of the ASCE.
He has published over 255 research papers in archival journals devoted to applied mechanics, geomechanics and applied mathematics, transport in porous media and computational mechanics and more than 275 in refereed international and national conferences. He is the author or co-author of texts devoted to Elastic Analysis of Soil-Foundation Interaction (Elsevier, 1979), Elasticity and Geomechanics (with R.O. Davis) (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Partial Differential Equations in Mechanics, Vols. 1&2 (Springer-Verlag, 2000), Plasticity and Geomechanics (with R.O. Davis) (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Transport in Porous Media. Aspects of Micro/Macro Behaviour (with Yasuaki Ichikawa) (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2012). He has also edited or co-edited 9 books and 7 Special Issues of International Journals with peer review, devoted to nuclear waste disposal, environmental geomechanics, mathematics and mechanics of granular media, theoretical solid mechanics and contact mechanics. He serves on the Editorial Boards of nine leading International Journals devoted to Geomechanics, Applied Mechanics, Computational Mechanics and Engineering Mathematics. Dr. Selvadurai is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, American Academy of Mechanics, Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. In 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
