Geotechnical News December 2011
15
CGS NEWS
2011 Legget Medal Award
Introduction for 2011 Legget
Medal Recipient: Professor
Emeritus Dr. W.D.Liam Finn
Introduction by: Adrian
Wightman, BGC Engineering
Inc.
Mr. President, honoured guests,
mesdames et messieurs, damas y
caballeros, ladies and gentlemen. It
is my privilege to introduce the R.F.
Legget medal recipient for 2011.
This year’s Legget medalist was
born in Ireland and after distinguish-
ing himself throughout his primary and
secondary education he graduated with
a first class honours degree in civil en-
gineering from the National University
of Ireland, at the age of 21. He prompt-
ly earned a Fulbright Scholarship to the
University of Washington in Seattle. In
Seattle he fell in love with soil mechan-
ics, along with skiing, tennis, and, fast
cars. He earned his M.Sc. in swelling
soils at 24, and his Ph.D in civil en-
gineering and mathematics with his
thesis on boundary value problems in
soil mechanics, at age 27. It was one of
those fast cars that shortly afterwards
brought him to Vancouver as an assis-
tant professor at UBC in 1961.
The year 1964, was a turning point
in our medalist’s career. The Alaska
earthquake in March and the Niigata
earthquake in June opened up a need
for research into liquefaction and soil
response to earthquake shaking. He
landed in the thick of this at UC Berke-
ley when he arrived as visiting profes-
sor in July 1964, to teach soil plasticity
but left as a fresh convert to the new
discipline of geotechnical earthquake
engineering. In that same year he was
appointed full professor and head of
the civil engineering department at
UBC. In the mid to late 1960s, hav-
ing obtained NSERC funding for cy-
clic triaxial, simple shear, and shaking
table equipment he gathered in a di-
verse group of like-minded faculty and
established some of the first graduate
courses in soil dynamics in the world,
and helped propel UBC to the forefront
of geotechnical earthquake engineer-
ing research in Canada, and around the
world. In 1970 he became the youngest
Dean of Applied Science in Canada at
the age of 37.
I well remember one evening in
1978, at a meeting of the Vancouver
branch of the CGS listening to a re-
markable lucid explanation of the Mar-
tin-Finn-Seed model of pore pressure
generation during earthquake shaking,
and having one of those rare light bulb
moments…. That’s how it works!
Of course I am speaking about Prof.
Emeritus W. D. Liam Finn. Liam is
proud of the fact that UBC was one of
the first laboratories to install a fully
automated shaking table that could
model soil response and liquefaction
– several years ahead of UC Berkeley.
This helped attracted students from
Japan starting a long period of contact
and research cooperation that lasted
well into the 1990s, earning Liam a
citation from the Japanese government
and honourary membership of the Jap-
anese Geotechnical Society in 1999.
And so it was that following his UBC
retirement in 1998 Liam spent the next
6 years in Japan where he held the post
of Anabuki Professor of Foundation
Geodynamics at Kagawa University.
During that period he continued to be
active internationally, giving the Mal-
let Milne Lecture on Earthquake Engi-
neering in London, England (the first
geotechnical engineer to be invited),
the First Ishihara Lecture at the 11th
international conference on Soil Dy-
namics and Earthquake Engineering,
and a Keynote lecture at the 13th world
conferencing on Earthquake Engineer-
ing in Vancouver. He is also the recipi-
ent of the R.M. Quigley Award from
the CGS. The G. Geoffrey Meyerhoff
award from the CGS, and is this year’s
recipient of the K.Y. Lo Medal from the
Engineering Institute of Canada.
Liam tells me that of his many tech-
nical achievements he is particularly
proud of the Martin-Finn-Seed model
for non-linear effective stress analysis,
and also of the Lagrangian formulation
for large displacement used in the Pro-
gram TARA-FL for modelling postliq-
uefaction displacements of soils.
Liam has remained very active since
his return to UBC in 2005. He is in-
volved in a program for seismic retrofit
of BC’s schools, a risk management
plan for the government of BC, the
Canadian seismic research network,
and the NRC’s Standing Committee on
Earthquake Design- the group which
writes the seismic provisions of the
Canadian building code, to name a few.
Over the years he has mentored over
40 graduate and post-doctoral students
and has published some 400 technical
papers, and been the keynote speaker at
countless conferences and seminars. In
short, Liam has had a profound impact
on our profession and the Canadian
Geotechnical Society.
Liam tells me that he still likes ex-
ploring the unknown in geotechnical
engineering and analysis - and these
days he enjoys the pursuit without hav-
ing to worry about the result. Liam
plans to pursue this while-ever he en-
joys it, and is relying on his friends to
tell him when to stop.
I think I am allowed to say that Li-
am’s nomination came from the hearts
of all the geotechnical faculty at UBC,
past and present, several of whom
are here today, so ladies and gentle-
men please join me in acknowledg-
ing our most worthy recipient of the
R.F. Legget medal for 2011, Professor
Emeritus W.D. Liam Finn.
Adrian Wightman
