Proceedings of the 6^th World Congress
on Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering (CSEE 2021)

Dr. Ellen Rathje
Ryerson University, Canada
ICEPTP Keynote

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.

Topic of Keynote:
Seismic Risk Assessment for Earth Slopes and Dams

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

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.

Topic of Keynote:
Engineering Applications of Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing Arrays

Dr. Richard J. Bathurst
Royal Military College of Canada, Canada
ICGRE Keynote

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.

Topic of Keynote:
From Physical Measurements to Design Codes for MSE Walls

Dr. Chul B. Park
Colorado School of Mines, USA
ICEPTP Plenary Speaker

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.

Dr. Yifeng Huang (Co-author and Co-speaker)

Dr. Huang received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2016. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Microcellular Plastics Manufacturing Laboratory at the University of Toronto. His research interests focus on designing and fabricating composite membranes and multifunctional polymer porous materials for various applications in chemical/environmental engineering, especially the chemical separation, water and wastewater treatment, and environmental remediation. He has published 26 journal papers with 11 Scopus H-index. Dr. Huang serves as Guest Editor for Processes.

Topic of Keynote:
Superhydrophobic and Oleophilic Polymeric Open Cellular Foams for Efficient Oil/Water Separation

Dr. Zongbo Shi
University of Birmingham, UK
ICEPTP Keynote

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.

Topic of Keynote:
Smaller Than Expected Benefit of COVID-19 Lockdown on Urban Air Quality

Dr. Martin Romantschuk
University of Helsinki, Finland
ICEPTP Keynote

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.

Topic of Keynote:
In Situ Bioremediation of Contaminated Soil and Ground Water; Lab Optimization Leads to Functional Combinations at Field Sites

Dr. Qingli Dai
Michigan Technological University, USA
ICSECT Keynote

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.

Topic of Keynote:
Characterization and Mechanism Analysis of Alkali-Silica Reaction in Cementitious Materials

Dr. Nawawi Chouw
University of Auckland, New Zealand
ICSECT Invited Keynote

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. His h-index: 29 (Web of Science), 32 (Scopus) and 37 (Google Scholar).

Topic of Keynote:
The Behaviour of a Structure within a Cluster of Structures in Earthquakes