Prof. Dr. Alexander Puzrin

Alexander M. Puzrin has been Full Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering of ETH Zurich since August 2004. He is engaged in the constitutive modeling of geomaterials and the analysis of progressive and catastrophic failure in soils, with applications to creeping subaerial landslides and tsunamigenic submarine landslides; development of novel sensor technologies for geotechnical monitoring; as well as chemical and biological soil improvement.

Professor Puzrin was born in 1965 in Moscow, USSR, where he studied Structural Engineering at the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineers (1982-1987) and Applied Mathematics at the Moscow State University (1990). He received his Ph.D. in Geotechnical Engineering from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in 1997. After post-doctoral research positions at Imperial College, Oxford University and Tokyo University, he joined the faculty at Technion as a Lecturer, being promoted to Associate Professor in 2001. In 2002 he was appointed as an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology (USA).

Professor Puzrin has been involved as an expert and consultant in large-scale geotechnical projects in Russia, Israel, Switzerland, Mexico, the UK and the US, working with authorities, law and engineering firms, as well as insurance and oil companies on the design and/or forensic geotechnical engineering aspects of various projects. He is a co-founder of the ETH Zurich spin-off company Marmota Engineering AG — a winner of the Venture 2010 competition — providing high-tech fiber-optics geotechnical monitoring services to the industry.

Professor Puzrin's interdisciplinary research is an interplay of geotechnics, experimental engineering mechanics, applied mathematics, sensor technologies, chemistry and microbiology. He is an author of five monographs and more than 70 journal publications. Professor Puzrin won the Technion Excellence in Teaching Award in 2001 and the American Society of Civil Engineers Outstanding Faculty Support Award in 2003; he was a recipient of the ETH Excellence in Teaching Award (Goldene Eule) in 2009 and 2013. The UK Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him with Geotechnical Research Medals in 2004 and 2013, and with the George Stephenson Medal in 2013. Professor Puzrin has been elected the Editor of the international journal Géotechnique and the Chairman of the Géotechnique Advisory Panel from 2012–2015.