5th Biot Conference on Poromechanics

As the year 2013 approaches, it seems appropriate to commemorate the "Grandfather" of Poromechanics, Karl von Terzaghi (1883-1963), the founder of consolidation experiments and theoretical soil mechanics in general. We will do so at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), the first university who granted Terzaghi, in 1929, a full professorship on the topic, and the place where Terzaghi established the, at that time, largest and most comprehensive soil mechanics laboratory in the world. Following the great examples of Terzaghi and Biot, our focus will be on the beneficial interaction of experiment, theory, and computation, and the merging of often over-specialized disciplines into a unified natural science viewpoint, jointly driven forward by scientists and engineers.