Antonio Gens is professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the Technical University of Catalonia where he was Head of Department. He has been involved in geotechnical research, consulting and education for over 35 years. He was ISSMGE Vice-President for Europe in the period 2013-2017. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and holds Doctorates Honoris Causa by the University of Grenoble in France and the Technical University of Bucharest. He has received numerous awards such as the UK ICE’s Telford Medal (twice) and the George Stephenson Medal (also twice). He delivered the 2007 Rankine Lecture and he has been awarded the Kevin Nash Gold Medal by the ISSMGE. In 2019 he has been recognized as Laureate Engineer by the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain.

María Victoria Villar has a Ph.D. in Geology and is working since 1989 at CIEMAT, a Spanish research centre for energy, environment and technology. She is an experimentalist, currently head of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory and of the research group on Thermo-hydro-mechanics and geochemistry of geomaterials. Her work has focused on the characterization and assessment of behaviour of host rocks and barrier materials for the disposal of radioactive waste and has been carried out mainly in the framework of projects financed by the European Commission and by Enresa, the Spanish agency for nuclear waste management. She has been the leader of 15 of these projects. She has received the George Stephenson Medal and is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Clay Science of Elsevier and member of the editorial boards of Engineering Geology and Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment.

Enrique Romero is Director of Research and Head of the Geotechnical Laboratory at the Technical University of Catalonia UPC (Spain). He has worked in theoretical and experimental multi-physics and multi-scale studies of thermal, chemical, electrical, biological and mechanical behaviour of natural/artificially prepared geological materials. He has been the principal investigator of more than 33 research projects funded by different European and Japanese agencies for the management of radioactive waste disposal over the last 15 years. He has also been researcher in charge at UPC/CIMNE of several European research mobility programs, Marie Curie ESR innovative training networks and recently of EURAD European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste. Co-editor of three books on experimental techniques ‘Advanced Experimental Unsaturated Soil Mechanics’ (2005), ‘Laboratory and Field Testing of Unsaturated Soils’ (2009) and ‘Advanced Experimental Techniques in Geomechanics’ (2012). Member of the editorial committee of several international journals, he has supervised since 2002 nineteen doctoral theses awarded with excellent cum laude.

Michael Maedo is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Bauru, Brazil. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering and Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UNESP. From 2015 to 2019, he attended Texas A&M University (TAMU) under CNPq Science without Borders Fellowship and obtained his Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering in 2019 at TAMU.

He has been the recipient of several awards. He was awarded the 2018-19 Energy Institute Fellowship and the Departmental Fellowship Award in 2019. He also graduated in UNESP with honors in 2012 due to his outstanding academic performance.

His research areas are associated with computational modeling of fractures in porous materials, unsaturated soil mechanics and thermo-hydro-mechanical analysis in porous media. He is currently reviewer of two top journals in his field, Computational Geosciences and the journal of Applied and Computational Mechanics. Michael Maedo is also the past-president (2018-2019) of the Texas A&M University Geo-Institute Student Chapter.