Professor Lyesse Laloui
Dr. Lyesse Laloui is Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Director of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory, where he has built his research career since 1994. Educated at the École Nationale des Travaux Publics in Algiers and at École Centrale Paris, where he earned his Ph.D. with honours in Soil and Structural Mechanics, he was appointed Professor at EPFL in 2006 and served as Director of the Civil Engineering Section from 2012 to 2022. He served as Vice President Europe of ISSMGE from 2022 to 2026, and is a member of Academia Europaea and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Professor Laloui has dedicated his career to understanding the behaviour of geomaterials and harnessing that knowledge in response to the defining environmental and energy challenges facing society, from geothermal energy and CO sequestration to nuclear waste disposal and bio-cementation. His research portfolio includes 13 written and edited books, among them the widely used Mécanique des Sols et des Roches and Energy Geostructures: Analysis and Design, and more than 450 peer-reviewed papers accumulating over 21,000 citations with an h-index of 70. Two of his papers rank among the top 1% cited works in Engineering worldwide. He is the founding Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment.
Professor Laloui has delivered more than 60 keynote and invited lectures at leading international conferences across five continents. His work has been recognised by leading institutions across Europe and North America, including the Roberval Award (2018), the ASCE Kersten Lecture (2020), the Vienna Terzaghi Lecture (2022), the DFI John Mitchell Lecture (2025), and the Interpore Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship Award (2026). He holds honorary doctorates from Heriot-Watt University and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. A lifelong commitment to innovation is exemplified in his four patents and the founding of companies to bring his research to market, including MeduSoil, Enerdrape, Nesol, and Geoeg.
