BIOT-8 is pleased to welcome the following distinguished plenary speakers:

What is the Status of Biot’s Dynamic Theory of Wave Propagation in Porous Media?

Robert Zimmerman, Ph.D., A.M.ASCE 
Professor, Chair in Rock Mechanics Department of Earth Science & Engineering - Faculty of Engineering
Imperial College London

Robert Zimmerman obtained a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a lecturer at UC Berkeley, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Head of the Division of Engineering Geology and Geophysics at KTH in Stockholm. He is currently Chair in Rock Mechanics at Imperial College London.

He is the author of the monograph Compressibility of Sandstones, published by Elsevier in 1991, and the textbook Fluid Flow in Porous Media, published by World Scientific in 2018. He is the co-author, with J.C. Jaeger and N.G.W. Cook, of Fundamentals of Rock Mechanics (4th ed.), published in 2007 by Wiley-Blackwell, and is the co-author, with Adriana Paluszny, of the new monograph Fluid Flow in Fractured Rocks, published by Wiley in 2024.

Prof. Zimmerman served as the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences from 2006-2023. In 2010, he was awarded the Maurice A. Biot Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, for his “outstanding contributions in applying poroelasticity to rock mechanics and fluid flow in fractured media.” He is a Fellow of the American Rock Mechanics Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK).

Homogenization enriched with spatial correlation functions for geomaterials

Chloé Arson, Ph.D., M.ASCE 
Professor, M.Eng. Director, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Cornell University

Dr. Chloé Arson is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University. Prior to Cornell, she was a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2012-2023) and at Texas A&M University (2009-2012). She earned her Ph.D. at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (France) in 2009. Dr. Arson’s expertise is in computational geomechanics, with a particular focus on damage and healing mechanics of polycrystalline materials, multi-scale modeling of porous media, and model reduction informed by deep learning. Her group developed modeling approaches that have allowed a fundamental understanding of synergetic micro-mechanisms in rocks, the prediction of instabilities in geomaterials, and the simulation of concurrent fracture propagation at multiple scales. Homogenization, computational mechanics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the pillars of Arson’s work. 

Inter-disciplinary collaborations have enabled her group to deploy modeling strategies for civil engineering, Earth sciences, mechanical engineering, material sciences, and biology. Dr. Arson received the CAREER and BRITE awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2016 and 2021 respectively. 
 

Cold region computational poromechanics

Steve Waiching Sun, Ph.D., M.ASCE 
Associate Professor, Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Columbia University

Dr. Steve Sun is an associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia University. He received his PhD from Northwestern in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, He worked as a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories. Sun’s research focuses on computational mechanics and scientific machine learning for material modeling. He received several awards, including the Walter Huber Prize and da Vinci Award from ASCE, the John Argyris Award from IACM, and the Zienkiewicz Numerical Methods in Engineering Prize from the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). He has served as an editor of the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering since April 2025.