Keynote Speaker Biographies

Sebnem Düzgün
Professor and Banfield Chair, Mining Engineering
PhD, Middle East Technical University

H. Sebnem Düzgün received her PhD from the Department of Mining Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2000 and had been a full professor in the same department since 2010. She was a visiting scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT from 1998 to 1999 with an award given by the Turkish Scientific and Technical Council (TUBITAK). She performed research as a postdoctoral fellow from 2004 to 2005 at Norwegian Geotechnical Institute and International Center for Geohazards with a grant from the Norwegian Research Council. Düzgün was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s experienced researcher fellowship in 2014 and used it to conduct research at the Geophysical Institute at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany from 2015 to 2016. She has been named to the Fred Banfield Distinguished Endowed Chair in Mining Engineering at Mines. Düzgün’s main research areas involve quantitative risk and resilience assessment in geohazards, structural reliability in rock engineering, spatial and spatio temporal data analysis and mining, Earth observation in geosciences, simulation and serious gaming for technical training. Düzgün is the author of four books, 10 book chapters and more than 200 papers.

Tony Dell
Engineering Specialist-Geotechnical, SNC Lavalin

Tony Dell has over 40 years of experience and currently serves as Discipline Lead Geotechnical Engineer for the Clean Power Division of SNC Lavalin in the Vancouver office. Tony is originally from South Africa and was the Chief Geotechnical Engineer on the Lesotho Highlands Phase 1 Project, which included a 185 m high double curvature concrete arch dam and 45 km of transfer tunnel using 3 open-face TBMs, before moving to Canada in 1993.

Over the past eighteen years Tony has been the Lead Geotechnical Engineer on hydropower projects around the world, some of which include dams, all of them involve rock mechanics including retaining walls, rock cuts for open excavations and tunnels. These projects include:

  • Brilliant Expansion Project in BC: an additional single Kaplan 120 MW unit in a surface powerhouse, tunnelling through the left bank of the existing dam in strong granodiorite;
  • Canada Line in Vancouver, BC: 19 km of LRT line which includes a cut-and-cover section and twin 2.4 km bored tunnels using a double shielded EPB machine in weak sandstone, boulder till and dense sand strata.
  • Karebbe Hydroelectric Project in Indonesia: 73 m high lean concrete dam and two Francis units generating 130 MW in a hydro-combine powerhouse, and twin diversion tunnels through the contact between peridotite and massive conglomerate;
  • Waneta Expansion Project in BC: an additional 335 MW using 2 Francis units in a surface excavation, tunnelling through the right bank of the existing dam in meta sediments and meta volcanics;
  • Hulu Terenganu Hydroelectric Project in Malaysia: two dams and two units generating 250 MW in an underground powerhouse with associated power and tailrace tunnels and construction adits;
  • John Hart Generating Station Replacement Project – this project is discussed in some detail in today’s presentation.

Fengshou (Frank) Zhang
Department of Geotechnical Engineering, Tongji University

Fengshou (Frank) Zhang is currently a professor in the Department of Geotechnical Engineering at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. He obtained his PhD degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012. After that he worked for 4 years in Itasca as a geomechanics engineer providing consulting services to the oil and gas industries in USA. His research focuses on multi-scale and multi-physics coupling process in the deep underground, with applications to unconventional hydraulic fracturing, fault slipping and stability, geothermal, microseismicity monitoring, deep mining, salt dome stability and soil erosion. He is a member of ARMA Future Leaders Class of 2015.

Andrew Bunger
University of Pittsburgh, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering

Andrew Bunger is an Assistant Professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He joined the University of Pittsburgh in 2013 after spending 10 years in Melbourne, Australia working in the Geomechanics Group within the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). Prior to that, he received his PhD in Geological Engineering from the University of Minnesota. His research interests include the mechanics of hydraulic fractures, coupled fluid-shale interaction, and the emplacement dynamics of magma-driven dykes and sills. The first conference he attended was the ARMA meeting in Washington, D.C. in 2001, and he has remained active in ARMA since, most recently serving in Future Leaders and on the Organizing Committee of the 50th U.S. Rock Mechanics Symposium held in Houston in 2016.