Alec Skempton

Sir Alec Westley Skempton (1914-2001) was an English civil engineer regarded, alongside Karl Terzaghi, as one of the founding fathers of the discipline of soil mechanics. He established soil mechanics teaching at Imperial College London and introduced the college first postgraduate program in the field in 1950, and he developed the A and B pore water pressure coefficients that remain widely used in practice today. He served as the second president of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, succeeding Terzaghi in 1957, contributed to quaternary geology, and consulted on major infrastructure projects including the Mangla Dam in Pakistan. He was also a historian of British civil engineering, editing biographical works on earlier pioneers such as John Smeaton, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1961, and was knighted in 2000 for services to engineering. Imperial College renamed its Civil and Environmental Engineering building in his honor in 2004. He died in 2001. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/