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Peter Rolfe Vaughan ACGI, DIC, FREng, FICE, FCGI, MASCE, FGS, (born 10 March 1935; died 16 May 2008) was Emeritus Professor of Ground Engineering in the Geotechnics department of Imperial College London.
Vaughan was born in Limbury near Luton, Bedfordshire in the UK on 10 March 1935, the son of Ernest Alfred Vaughan, a civil servant, and Clarise Marjory Ward, a school teacher, and was educated at Luton Grammar School before going on to do a BSc at Imperial College. He played rugby for his school, the college and for the Luton Grammar School old boys team.
He graduated in 1956 and went to work for two years for Sandeman Kennard & Partners as an assistant engineer on the design of various dams in the north of England before returning to Imperial to do a diploma course in Soil Mechanics. He received his PhD in 1963 at Imperial College for his research on the instrumentation of earthworks (thesis title Field measurements in earth dams under the supervision of Alan W. Bishop) before going to work in Africa in 1964, where he was supervising engineer on the construction of the embankments of the Kainji Dam in Nigeria.
He continued to mix working in the academic environment of Imperial College with working on engineering projects in the real world for his entire career. He was project engineer for Cow Green Embankment Dam and the Balderhead Dam in the late sixties and lecturer, senior lecturer then reader in the Soil Mechanics Section of Imperial College in the seventies and eighties, becoming Professor of Ground Engineering in 1987 and emeritus professor on his retirement in 1996. During this time he carried out extensive research in subjects such as the properties of weak rocks, stiff clays, residual and other structured soils. He was an internationally recognised expert in the design and deterioration of earthworks and fills, embankment dams and natural or man-made slopes. His expertise also included seepage, residual strength and pore pressure measurement and its interpretation. His academic post at Imperial included supervising more than twenty PhD programmes and publishing some 80 papers on technical subjects. He was also an acclaimed and amusing lecturer, having given numerous lectures to international conferences and the Rankine Lecture to the British Geotechnical Association in 1994. An example of his style is given in an article published in the Guardian on Wednesday 1 February 2006:
"Much seems to depend on words; many people seem to think "reservoir" a rather unpleasant one, and Hattersley admits that he was one. My advice to any reservoir promoter is never say "reservoir", say "lake". Even better, say "wetland habitat". Better still, promote it as a leisure amenity. ("There will be bird watching, cycling, fishing, picnicking, sailing and walking and you can get it all for free if we sometimes sell some of the water to the local water undertaking.") If all else fails, ask for some extra land beside it, cut the grass short, plant 18 little flags and call it a "lateral water hazard"."
Peter Vaughan was an active consultant throughout his career. One of the founding members of Geotechnical Consulting Group he gave specialist advice to consulting firms, contractors, utilities and public authorities on a wide range of problems, such as the reconstruction of Carsington Dam after its failure during construction, and Roadford Dam, where he was a member of the Advisory Panel. He was involved with a review of dam performance for Ardleigh Dam, Essex, a safety review for Mica Dam, Canada, and the rehabilitation of the three dams of the Cascade of Dauga in Latvia for which he was a member of the Advisory Panel. He was involved extensively with the rehabilitation of old clay embankments for London Underground Limited.
He travelled widely on both consultancy work and giving lectures to international engineering bodies. His spare time was taken up with fly fishing and enjoying fine wines, good food and better company. A very generous associate, colleague or friend, he never married and he died of a heart attack at his home in Suffolk on 16 May 2008.
Sir Alec Westley Skempton was an English civil engineer internationally recognised, along with Karl Terzaghi, as one of the founding fathers of the engineering discipline of soil mechanics. He established the soil mechanics course at Imperial College London, where the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department's building was renamed after him in 2004, and was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to engineering. He was also a notable contributor on the history of British civil engineering.
Internal erosion is the formation of voids within a soil caused by the removal of material by seepage. It is the second most common cause of failure in levees and one of the leading causes of failures in earth dams, responsible for about half of embankment dam failures.
The Telford Medal is a prize awarded by the British Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) for a paper or series of papers. It was introduced in 1835 following a bequest made by Thomas Telford, the ICE's first president. It can be awarded in gold, silver or bronze; the Telford Gold Medal is the highest award the institution can bestow.
The Rankine lecture is an annual lecture organised by the British Geotechnical Association named after William John Macquorn Rankine, an early contributor to the theory of soil mechanics.
John Boscawen Burland is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Investigator at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Imperial College London.
Sarada Kanta Sarma is a geotechnical engineer, emeritus reader of engineering seismology and senior research investigator at Imperial College London. He has developed a method of seismic slope stability analysis which is named after him, the Sarma method.
The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is the academic department at Imperial College London dedicated to civil engineering. It is located at the South Kensington Campus in London, along Imperial College Road. The department is currently a part of the college's Faculty of Engineering, which was formed in 2001 when Imperial College restructured. The department has consistently ranked within the top five on the QS World University Rankings in recent years.
Thomas Denis O’Rourke is an American educator, engineer and serves as the Thomas R. Biggs Professor of civil & environmental engineering at the Cornell University College of Engineering. O’Rourke took his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering at Cornell's engineering college in 1970 and his doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1975.
Andrew Noel Schofield FRS FREng is a British soil mechanics engineer and an emeritus professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Cambridge.
The Sarma method is a method used primarily to assess the stability of soil slopes under seismic conditions. Using appropriate assumptions the method can also be employed for static slope stability analysis. It was proposed by Sarada K. Sarma in the early 1970s as an improvement over the other conventional methods of analysis which had adopted numerous simplifying assumptions.
Harry George Poulos is an Australian of Greek descent civil engineer specialising in geotechnical engineering and soil mechanics, internationally known as an expert on soil behaviour and pile foundations.
David Malcolm Potts is a professor of Analytical Soil Mechanics at Imperial College London and the head of the Geotechnics Section at Imperial College. He has been a member of the academic staff at Imperial College since 1979, responsible for teaching the use of analytical methods in geomechanics and the design of slopes and earth retaining structures, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Charles Peter Wroth (1929–1991) was a British Civil Engineer, a world pioneer in Geotechnical Engineering and Soil Mechanics. He led the design and construction of the Hammersmith flyover.
Kenneth Harry Roscoe (1914–1970) was a British civil engineer who made tremendous contributions to the plasticity theories of soil mechanics.
Malcolm David Bolton is a British soil mechanics engineer and professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Cambridge.
Nicholas Neocles Ambraseys FICE FREng was a Greek engineering seismologist. He was emeritus professor of engineering seismology and senior research fellow at Imperial College London. For many years Ambraseys was considered the leading figure and an authority in earthquake engineering and seismology in Europe.
David William Hight is a senior consultant at the Geotechnical Consulting Group, a company providing high-level expertise in the field of geotechnical engineering and well known for bridging the gap between research and engineering practice.
David Muir Wood is an academic working in the field of geomechanics and soil mechanics, famous for having pioneered advances in mathematical modelling of soils, informed by experimental observation. The hallmark of his modelling efforts has been to formulate elegant models that capture the essence of the material response while being accessible to practitioners of Geotechnical engineering.
Jeremiah Edmund Bowden Jennings was a Professor in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa and its head of department from 1954 until his retirement in 1976.
Geoffrey Eustace Blight was a professor in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), serving twice as head of department.
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