Basic HTML Version
14
Geotechnical News • December 2013
www.geotechnicalnews.com
CANADIAN GEOTECHNICAL SOCIETY NEWS
Modeling of Rainfall Induced Land-
slides
. Her presentation followed the
CGS Colloquium speaker on the last
morning session of the conference.
The
Best Undergraduate Student
Report
winners were
Steven Harms
of the University of Manitoba in the
individual submission category and
Gary Cui, Jessica Galavan, Dun-
can Leung
and
Matthew Lloyd
of Queen’s University in the group
submission category. Congratulations
to all the winners identified above.
Finally, I am pleased to announce
that the
2013 Canadian Foundation
for Geotechnique National Gradu-
ate Scholarship
winner was
Bryan
Tatone
of the University of Toronto.
A summary of all Award winners and
recognitions that were made during
the CGS events at GeoMontreal can be
found later in this section of the Cana-
dian Geotechnical Society News.
The CGS annual conference was fol-
lowed immediately by the
4
th
Cana-
dian Young Geotechnical Engineers
and Geoscientists Conference
in
Mount Tremblant. I was delighted to
take part in the conference tour of the
Beauharnois Generating Station and
associated geotechnical works prior to
departing to Mount Tremblant. There
were a total of 30 delegates, all under
35 years of age. The organizing com-
mittee led by
Ariane Locat
(Laval)
and
Matt Perras
(Queen’s), kindly
allowed me to present a keynote
address on
The Canadian Geotechni-
cal Society, Past, Present and Future
.
This gave me the opportunity to not
only talk about our Society that was
formed in 1972, but also to link the
Society and some of its famous mem-
bers to important accomplishment
in Canadian geotechnique.
Angela
Küpper
(CGS VP Technical),
Lukas
Arenson
(Chair CGS Cold Regions
Division),
André Rancourt
(VP at
Hydrosys). and
Jocelyn Grozic
(Uni-
versity of Calgary) also gave keynote
talks that described their careers
in industry, academia and lessons
learned. The young delegates also pro-
vided useful feedback on how to better
engage our young student members
before and after graduation.
Other notable events at this conference
included a presentation celebrating
the 50
th
anniversary of the
Canadian
Geotechnical Journal
by the cur-
rent and past-editors of the Journal,
Ian Moore
and
Dennis Becker.
I
also had the pleasure of reminding
the CGS audience that our Journal is
highly regarded internationally and is
routinely placed in the top tier of peer-
reviewed “geo-journals” by journal
ranking agencies.
In addition to the annual meetings of
the CGS Divisions and Committees,
two ad-hoc meetings were held. The
first was a meeting chaired by myself
with members of the CGS Execu-
tive, past editors of the 4
th
CFEM and
other interested persons present. We
discussed ideas regarding the scope,
objectives and delivery of the next 5
th
CFEM. The group agreed that an elec-
tronic survey will be sent to all CGS
members to gather their ideas on this
very important update of the CFEM.
The second meeting was chaired by
our VP Technical,
Angela Küpper
.
It was focused on future programs to
raise the visibility of the Society and
to better engage our young members.
A starting point for this discussion was
the
2011 CGS Membership Com-
mittee Task Force Report
which can
be found on the CGS website. Angela
presented a number of ideas including
grants from the CGS to get more stu-
dents to our annual conference, a stu-
dent/CGS member mentoring program
at our annual conference, and funding
for a program to place academics with
consultants so that case history data
that is located in the vaults of many
consulting firms can be released to
young academics who can use the data
to support practical research projects.
Angela will be reporting on progress