Harry Bolton Seed was born in Bolton, England, on August 19, 1922. He spent his childhood in Lancashire and showed talent in sports and academics from an early age.
At the age of 18, he chose a scholarship at King’s College London over a potential professional soccer playing career. His studies were soon interrupted by the Second World War, but he returned to the University of London, after serving in the army, and received his BSc in Civil Engineering in 1944. He continued studying at the University of London, pursuing a PhD in Structural Engineering, which he obtained in 1947. It is also worth mentioning that during his studies he was also captain of the University’s soccer team.
Following, Seed went to study soil mechanics at Harvard University, under Karl Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande, where he obtained his S.M. degree from, in 1948. He spent the next year as an instructor at Harvard, and the one after as a foundation engineer at Thomas Worcester Inc. in Boston.
In 1950, Seed joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he stayed for the rest of his career as an educator, researcher and consultant and Civil Engineering Department char between 1965 and 1971. During his time at University of California, Berkeley, he guided 50 PhD candidates to the successful completion of their dissertations as well as making their geotechnical engineering program one of the best in the world.
Harry Bolton Seed published about 300 papers during his career and his early research interest was in soil-pile interaction, where he formed the basis for modern design. However, during the 1960s, he began researching a new topic, geotechnical earthquake engineering, an area which he is considered the founding father of.
Harry Bolton Seed’s death came on April 23, 1989, in California and a great biographical memoir of him can be found here. His birth and death dates, as well as many others’ and a plethora of geo-engineering events of significance can be found in our new “on this day” feature, which is located on Geoengineer.org's home page and updated every day!
Source: en.wikipedia.org
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