Suzanne Lacasse
Suzanne Lacasse (September 22, 1948– )was born in the mining town of Noranda in northern Québec, Canada. She completed her Bachelor of Arts at University of Ottawa and Civil Engineering degree at Ecole Polytechnique of Montréal. Graduate studies followed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and Ecole Polytechnique. She obtained her Ph. D. in 1976. She was Lecturer at Ecole Polytechnique (1973-1975), and at MIT(1975-1982). She was also Head of the Geotechnical Laboratory at MIT (1975-1980).
Biography
Dr. Lacasse became a permanent employee of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in 1980. She is member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineers, the Canadian Academy of Engineers, the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Engineering Institute of Canada, the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Knight of the First Class in the Order of the Falcon of Iceland. She gave the 37th Terzaghi Lecture in 2001. She served as President of the Canadian Geotechnical Society in 2003 and 2004.
She combined her position at NGI with visiting professorship at MIT for 5 years. She held a number of research and consulting assignments abroad and has delivered invited lecturer in over 20 countries. She became Managing Director of NGI in 1991. She holds a number of positions on the Board of
private companies and research organisations in Norway and abroad.
Dr. Lacasse received many awards, including a doctorate Honoris Causa from the Norwegian University of Trondheim and the University of Dundee in Scotland, the K.Y. Lo Medal of the Engineering Institute of Canada for excellence in engineering, the 125-Year "Personalités"-Award of
the Ecole Polytechnique of Montréal and the Effective Teaching Award in Civil Engineering at MIT. On March 18th 2015, for the first woman, she has been awarded Rankine Lecturers, which referred to as the Nobel prize of geotechnics. The Rankine Lecture, followed by the Rankine Dinner, is organized annually by the UK Institution of Civil Engineers and The British Geotechnical Association.
"Hazard, risk and reliability in geotechnical practice" is the title of her Rankine lecture. More and more, society requires to know the risk to which people, property and the environment are exposed. The objective of Suzanne Lacasse's Rankine Lecture is to convey that one can implement, with benefit, concepts of hazard, risk and reliability to assist in design, decision-making and engineering recommendations. In 1967, NGI's first Managing Director, Dr Laurits Bjerrum, was awarded the honor of giving the Rankine Lecture.
During the early part of her professional career, Dr. Lacasse concentrated her work in the field of geotechnical laboratory techniques, soil behavior studies and in-situ investigation methods. She published several often referred to articles and reports within these fields. Subsequently, she worked in the area of foundation engineering and design, both for structures on land and offshore, projects involving slope stability evaluation and improvement, and development of calculation procedures. In her work, Dr. Lacasse concentrated on combining mathematical and numerical analyses with practical geotechnical engineering design considerations. She was a key member of the NGI-team developing practical design analysis procedures for offshore platforms subjected to storm loading. The procedures have become widely recognized and accepted. Since 1985, she developed and applied probabilistic and reliability analyses to assist in the foundation design and decision process and is well known for these contributions. She has carried our hazard and risk analyses for many of the geo-engineering structures, including dams and offshore structures. While Managing Director of the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, she is still active on research and consulting projects.
References
[1]"Suzanne Lacasse, NGI, to deliver the 2015 Rankine Lecture"