Amod Mani Dixit
Executive Director, National Society for Earthquake Technology, Nepal
Lecture Topic:
Earthquake disaster risk management efforts in Nepal
Dr. Amod Mani Dixit (Nepal) is a leading earthquake disaster management professional, involved in this field for the past 20 years. A geologist by academic background, Dr. Dixit has demonstrated to the world, especially to the nations that have tremendously suffered from earthquake disasters or hold a high risk of earthquake disaster in near future that an individual desire can always make a change. He currently leads a non-governmental organization in Nepal, which in these 20 years has demonstrated that a well-managed and dedicated organization is also possible in a resource lacking place like Nepal.
Dr. Dixit was recently awarded a Doctor of Engineering degree by Ehime University of Japan in recognition of his research study in the field of earthquake disaster risk management focusing in Nepal. He has a Bachelor-cum-Master degree from the Leningrad Mining University, Russia (1973), and also has Master of Science degree from Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok. His work experience includes about 18 years of government service (Department of Mines and Geology, Nepal), 11 years of parallel consulting service to an engineering consulting firm, and 20 years with National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), a non-governmental organization established by himself and his team members back in 1993.
Dr. Dixit has an authored/co-authored publication record of about 70 papers including national and international conference proceedings, books and book chapters, and renowned international journals. He and his organization NSET have not only contributed to Nepal and Nepalese community but also have made a great name in the world in the field of earthquake disaster risk management.
Simonetta Cola
Professor, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Padova, Italy
Lecture Topic:
Monitoring of the Tessina landslide in the Italian Alps to improve prediction criteria
Prof. Dr. Simonetta Cola is a Professor of geotechnical engineering at University of Padova (UniPD), Italy. She is currently the Director of Geotechnical Laboratory as well as the Laboratory of Physical Modelling for Geotechnics at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering of UniPD.
Prof. Cola holds a master degree with honors in civil engineering and a PhD in geotechnical Engineering (1994). Before joining the current academic position, she has an experience of working as a consulting engineer at ISMES in Bergamo, Italy (1990), and she served Imperial College of London as a visiting professor back in 1995. She currently teaches Geotechnics, Soil and Rock Mechanics, Soil Improvement and Earth Construction.
Prof. Cola is extensively involved in international collaboration at UniPD, such as with the Sheffield University, Imperial College of London (UK), University of California (Berkeley), and Università Politecnica of Madrid (Spain). She is a reviewer for various renowned international journals, such as Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering (ASCE), Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Journal, etc. She also is a member in the ISSMGE Technical Committees No. 201 (Geotechnical Aspects of Dykes and Levees, Shore Protection and Land Reclamation). Her main fields of research interest include experimental analysis and constitutive modelling of natural heterogeneous soils, geotechnical properties of organic soils, discrete models applied to geotechnical problems, stability analysis of natural slopes and their stabilization, deep-mixing, soil nailing, and mudflows.
Susumu Yasuda
Professor, Tokyo Denki University, Japan
Lecture Topic:
Hazard maps on liquefaction-induced damage to houses in Tokyo Bay area evaluated by representative soil profile models
Prof. Dr. Susumu YASUDA is senior faculty of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tokyo Denki University. Born in 1948, Prof. Yasuda received his B.S. in civil engineering from Kyushu Institute of Technology (Japan), and his Doctor of Engineering in civil engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1975. Following his Doctor of Engineering degree, he worked at Kiso-Jiban Consultants Co. as a geotechnical consulting engineer. He then joined Kyushu Institute of Technology in 1986, and moved to Tokyo Denki University in 1994.
Prof. Yasuda’s main research interest is soil liquefaction during earthquakes. He has visited many different countries to investigate the damage due to liquefaction. He has served the Japanese Geotechnical Society as Vice President from 2006 to 2007, and has been serving Japan Association for Earthquake Engineering as the President since 2013. In the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, he was the chairman of the Asian Technical Committee (ATC) No. 10 on Urban Geo-informatics from 2002 to 2006, and the chairman of the ATC No.3 on Geotechnology for Natural Hazards from 2006 to 2010.
