Stefan Van Baars will hold his inaugural lecture, Knowing and showing underground risks, on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 on campus Kirchberg, hall Paul Feidert.

In Luxembourg the number of inhabitants is ever growing, and ever more people cross the border every day in order to work in Luxembourg. This causes a strong demand on new offices, houses, roads and tunnels. Building pits are everywhere. This means there is a golden time going on for geotechnical engineers, especially in a hilly Luxemburg.

 Geotechnical Engineers build deeper, longer and in more complex soil conditions than ever before, but they also have to face bigger geotechnical and geological disasters than before. There are so many examples, such as the dramatic failures of the dikes in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the collapses of the Nicoll Highway Tunnel in Singapore and the North-South Line in Köln, the pile driving vibration and noise nightmare of Eindhoven, the major problems of the North-South line tunnel in Amsterdam, the Museum Park Garage in Rotterdam, the underground parking garage of the new Theater in Middelburg and of the flooded Tramtunnel in Den Hague, which was called the Den Hague Swim-Tunnel and the Tram-Tanic. Also the building pit next to the church in Differdange, Luxembourg, is a catastrophic example. Geotechnical engineers have to do better ; it is time to

Prof. Dr. Ir. Stefan Van Baars holds the chair of “Foundation Engineering and Soil Mechanics” at the University of Luxembourg since June 2010. Stefan Van Baars (1968) studied Civil Engineering at the Delft University of Technology and has specialised in two fields : Geotechnical Engineering and Hydraulical Engineering. He obtained his PhD degree in 1996 in Delft. His research entitled “Discrete element analysis of granular materials” has been awarded Summa Cum Laude. This research has been extended with a post-doc research at the University of Sydney.

After Sydney, Stefan Van Baars worked for the Dutch Ministry of Transport and Public Works on bored tunnels, for the Dutch contractin  g company Strukton on pile foundations and building pits and returned in 2001 to the faculty of Civil Engineering of the Delft University of Technology as an assistant professor. The first three years for the chair of Structural Hydraulic Engineering and the last six years for the chair of Soil Mechanics. In this position he visited twice the University of Grenoble (sabbatical leave at Université Joseph Fourier and professeur invité at the Ecole National de Polytechnique Grenoble). His main fields of research were soil dynamics, constitutive soil modeling and dike engineering.
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 Introduction by Prof. Dr.–Ing. Paul Heuschling, Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication.
A reception will take place after the inaugural lecture.