Professor Lord Mair

Lord Robert Mair was President of the Institution of Civil Engineers 2017-2018. In October 2017 he became Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of Research at Cambridge University. After 27 years in industry he was appointed Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Cambridge in 1998. He was the Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering 2011-2017, and Master of Jesus College 2001-2011. He was a Fellow of St John's College from 1998 to 2001. He is also one of the founding Directors of the Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG), an international consulting company based in London, started in 1983.

After graduating in 1971 from Cambridge University, where he read Engineering at Clare College, he worked continuously in industry until 1998, except for a three year period in the late 1970’s when he was seconded to Cambridge to work for his PhD on tunnelling in soft ground. His early involvement with tunnels began at that time, when he undertook research for the UK Transport Research Laboratory on the subject of centrifuge modelling of tunnel construction in soft ground. He was awarded a PhD for this work in 1979.

Throughout his career he has specialised principally in underground construction, providing advice on numerous projects world-wide involving soft ground tunnelling, retaining structures, deep excavations and foundations.  International projects have included railway tunnels in the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Singapore and Warsaw, and motorway tunnels in Turkey. In the UK he has been closely involved with the design and construction of the Jubilee Line Extension for London Underground, and with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (now HS1) and Crossrail (now Elizabeth Line) projects. He was responsible for the introduction of compensation grouting in the UK as a novel technique for controlling settlement of structures during tunnel construction - on the Waterloo Escalator Tunnel Project. The technique was used on the Jubilee Line Extension Project for the protection of many historic buildings, including the Big Ben Clock Tower at the Palace of Westminster, and has since been widely adopted on many urban underground construction projects.

He has been a member of Expert Review Panels on major international underground construction projects, and   was Co-Chair of the International Advisory Board for the Singapore Land Transport Authority, advising on design and construction aspects of all underground transport tunnels and deep excavations in Singapore. He was a member of the French Government Commission of Enquiry into the collapse of a road tunnel in Toulon. More recently he has been a member of the Engineering Expert Panel for London’s Crossrail (now Elizabeth Line) and the Independent Technical Expert Panel on Tunnelling for HS2..

Robert Mair has published many papers, mainly on the geotechnical aspects of soft ground tunnelling and excavations (see separate list of publications) and has been an invited lecturer at universities and conferences in many countries. He delivered the Institution of Civil Engineers Unwin Memorial Lecture in 1992, the Theme Lecture on Bored Tunnelling in the Urban Environment at the International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering at Hamburg in 1997, the Sir Harold Harding Memorial Lecture at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1998, the Terzaghi Lecture in Vienna and the Szechy Memorial Lecture in Budapest in 2001, the Jiminez Salas Lecture in Madrid in 2003, the Paviors Lecture in London in 2004 and the Jennings Lecture in Johannesburg in 2005. He delivered the Rankine Lecture in 2006, the Muir Wood Lecture in Helsinki in 2011,  the Keynote Lecture at the 15th European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in Athens in 2011, the Casagrande Lecture in Boston, USA in 2014 and the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Hinton Lecture in 2015.

He was awarded the British Geotechnical Society Prize in 1980 for his work on tunnels, the Institution of Civil Engineers Geotechnical Research Medal in 1994, their Gold Medal in 2004 and their President’s Medal in 2013. He has been a Board Member of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering (ISSMGE), and for 10 years was Chairman of its Technical Committee (TC 28) on Underground Construction in Soft Ground. He gave evidence to a House of Lords Select Committee on the Crossrail project in London and to a House of Commons Select Committee on HS2. He led  a major research group at Cambridge and  was the Founding Head of  the Centre on Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), funded by EPSRC/Innovate(UK) and industry to a total value currently of £22m.

He chaired the Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering Review of Shale Gas Extraction in the UK; the report was published in  2012. Following the tragic train derailment in Scotland in August 2020 he was appointed Chair of the Task Force Review of Network Rail’s Earthworks Management; the report was published in February 2021. In 2022 he was Chair of the Technical Review Panel appointed by EDF to review the technical risks and opportunities relating to marine works tunnel shaft connections for Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. He has recently chaired similar independent reviews of aspects of Sizewell C nuclear power station, appointed by EDF.

He is  a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (its Senior Vice-President 2008-2011), a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded a CBE in the 2010 New Year's Honours list and in 2015 was appointed an independent crossbencher in the House of Lords, where he has been active on matters relating to infrastructure, science and technology, and education.  He was a member of its Select Committee on Science and Technology for four years, and has also been a member of Select Committees on Assessment and Management of Risk, and Education and Skills; he is presently a member of the Select Committee on the Built Environment.