IAHR Presidents since 1935
Below is the list of IAHR Presidents since the association was founded in 1935:
Since 2023:
Philippe Gourbesville, France
Prof. Philippe is professor of Hydroinformatics at Polytech Nice Sophia, the graduate school of engineering of Université Côte d’Azur, France, since 1997. He graduated from Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg (France) in 1993 and started his career as hydraulic engineer in a French consulting company and was involved in projects in Europe, Africa and Asia.
After joining University Côte d’Azur (former University of Nice Sophia Antipolis) as associate professor and professor in 2006, he managed a wide range of research projects on hydro-environmental modelling within different frameworks including 16 European Commission projects as member, work package leader or coordinator. Read more
2019-2023:
Joseph Hun-wei Lee, Hong Kong, China
Prof. Lee grew up and attended high school in Hong Kong. In 1969 he went to USA on a scholarship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he obtained his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering (1969-1977). For his postgraduate studies he conducted research in environmental hydromechanics under the supervision of Professor Donald R. F. Harleman and Professor Gerhard H. Jirka. After three years of teaching as Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Delaware he joined University of Hong Kong (HKU) as a Lecturer in 1980, where he rose through the ranks (Senior Lecturer: 1987-1991; Reader: 1992-1994) to Redmond Chair Professor of Civil Engineering in 1995. Read more
2015-2019:
Peter Goodwin, USA
Dr. Peter Goodwin is professor and president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. He is an internationally recognized expert in ecosystem restoration, ecohydraulics, and enhancement of river, wetland and estuarine systems, and he has spent 30 years in higher education. He has participated in the river restoration, coastal wetland sustainability, flood control, and sediment management projects around the world, including Chile and Guatemala, and estuarine and tidal wetland restoration projects on the East, Gulf, and West Coasts of the United States, from Delaware Bay to California.
2011-2015:
Roger Falconer, UK
Prof. Roger is Emeritus Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University; Chair Professor at Hohai University, China; and an Independent Water Consultant. He graduated from Imperial College with a PhD in 1976, followed by posts at the universities of Birmingham (Lecturer, 1977-86), Bradford (Professor 1987-97), and Cardiff (Professor 1997-18). He has managed a wide range of research projects on hydro-environmental modelling and has been involved in over 100 EIA studies worldwide. He has published extensively in the field of water engineering and environmental management, advises governments and consulting companies internationally on water related topics, and regularly gives lectures and participates in media and TV interviews on topics such as: flooding, tidal energy and global water security. Read more
2007-2011:
Nobuyuki Tamai, Japan
Prof. Em. Nobuyuki Tamai was born on November 6, 1941 in Toyohashi City, Japan. He graduated from the University of Tokyo with Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering in 1964. From 1967 to 1968 he stayed in Ph.D. course under Prof. Robert Wiegel at the Univ. of California, Berkeley as a Fulbright Travel Grant Student. He returned to the Univ. of Tokyo to accept a faculty position and was promoted to Assistant Professor in April 1969. He obtained Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo in July 1972.
Tamai received an incentive award of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers in 1974 for the paper entitled by “Unified view of diffusion and dispersion in coastal waters” published in Jour. of the Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo (B), Vol. XXXI, pp. 531-692, No.4, 1972. Read more
2003-2007:
Etienne Mansard, Canada
Etienne Mansard was born on October 9, 1946 in Karaikal, India, one of the old South-Indian French territories. He obtained his civil engineering degree from the University of Annamalai and his MTech in hydraulics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. Three years later he moved to the Grenoble University in France where he acquired his PhD thesis in 1976. He joined the National Research Council of Canada NRC in 1976, and is now Executive Director of the Canadian Hydraulics Centre of NRC. During his career, he developed several state-of-the-art concepts for the simulation of sea states in laboratory basins to advance the understanding of the complex physics involved in wave-structure interactions. He is currently an expert in laboratory reproduction of waves, and has participated in several international committees on waves and breakwaters. Read more
1999-2003:
Forrest M. Holly Jr, USA
Forrest Merton Holly Jr., distinguished hydraulician, leader in civil engineering, and stimulating companion, passed away on Monday, May 22, 2017. His professional life was filled with significant advances in computational hydraulics, understated leadership, and many interests that he pursued energetically. He gained the esteem, gratitude, and affection of the many people with whom he came in contact.
His service as IAHR president (2000–03) reflected his genial, highly competent approach to the tasks he tackled.
Forrest Holly, a native of La Jolla, Calif., completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University in 1968. Read more
1995-1999:
Helmut Kobus, Germany
Helmut Kobus was born on May 17, 1937, in Stuttgart, Germany. After graduation as a civil engineer from the Technical University in Stuttgart in 1961, he moved for four years to the Institute of Hydraulic Research of the State University of Iowa, USA to submit in 1965 his PhD thesis. There he also translated two books from the Bernoulli family from Latin into English. In 1966, Kobus returned as a post-doc to the Technical University of Berlin and from 1968 headed the hydraulics laboratory of the Technical University of Karlsruhe, where he submitted his habilitation thesis in 1973. Read more
1990-1995:
Torkild Carstens, Norway
Torkild Carstens (1931-2014) IAHR President Emeritus and Honorary Member, was born in Vadsø in northern Norway on the 14th of March 1931. He passed away in Oslo on the 30th of June 2014 after a stroke. Torkild received a siv. ing. degree in 1954 from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim). He obtained an MSc degree from the University of Minnesota in 1958 and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, where Prof. Hans Albert Einstein was his supervisor. Read more
1987-1990:
John (Jack) Dempster Lawson, Australia
John (Jack) Dempster Lawson was born on June 10, 1926 in Perth, Australia, and passed away on October 28, 1991 in Melbourne. He was educated as a civil engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth from 1944 to 1949 and received a PhD title from the University of Aberdeen, UK in 1951. After having been associated with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority, he joined the University of Melbourne as a senior lecturer in 1954 and there designed a new Hydraulics Laboratory. In 1962, this facility counted among the best in Australia. Read more
1983-1987:
Erich J. Plate, Germany
Erich J. Plate was born on July 14, 1929 in Hamburg, Germany. He graduated from Stuttgart Technical University as a civil engineer in 1954 and there submitted his PhD thesis in 1964. From 1954 to 1957 he was a Fulbright Student at Colorado State University CSU, returned then for two years to Stuttgart University to accept in 1959 a CSU faculty position. He was appointed there professor of water resources in 1968 and from 1970 he was a professor at Karlsruhe Technical University. His research topics included water resources, waves, and pollution of water and air. Plate directed the Karlsruhe Institute for Hydrology and Water Resources in the 1970s. He was awarded the James Croes Gold Medal from ASCE in 1971. Read more
1980-1983:
John Fisher Kennedy, USA
John Fisher Kennedy was born on December 17, 1933 in Farmington NM and passed away on December 13, 1991 in Iowa City IA. He graduated from Notre Dame University in 1955 and received his MS and PhD degrees in 1956 and 1960, respectively, from Caltech. He joined the MIT faculty in 1961 and in 1966 succeeded Hunter Rouse (1906-1996) as director of Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research. He received many honors and awards during his distinguished career. Kennedy was an expert in sediment transport and contributed significantly to the understanding of alluvial river processes. He also took interest in the management of waste heat from steam generation of electrical power, and in turbulent mixing of fluids.
1975-1979:
Michel Hug, France
Michel Hug was born on May 30, 1930 in Courson, France, graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, and received in 1956 a doctorate in hydraulics and fluid mechanics at the State University of Iowa, USA. He then joined the national electricity board EDF where he was engaged for the following decade with various questions in hydraulics at the EDF research center in Chatou. In 1966, Hug was appointed as EDF Regional director of planning and construction in Marseille and thus he was involved in hydroelectric power plants on the Durance and the Verdon Rivers. In 1972 he was appointed as the chairman of the planning engineering and construction board and thus headed the French nuclear power program for the next ten years. Read more
1972-1975:
Taizo Hayashi, Japan
Taizo Hayashi was born on June 28, 1920 in Nagoya, Japan, and passed away as a result of cerebral infraction on February 9, 1998 in Tokyo. After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1942 he was there as a Lecturer in the Department of Civil Engineering and received his PhD title in 1953. In 1950, he joined the Chuo University in Tokyo which had been newly founded after World War II. He set up a hydraulics laboratory and stayed there until retirement in 1991. In 1950 Hayashi was a Fulbright scholar with an invitation to MIT in the USA. Later he traveled to a number of countries and was well acquainted with the international experts with whom he had lifelong friendship. Read more
1965-1971:
James Wallace Daily, USA
James Wallace Daily was born on March 19, 1913 in Columbia MO, and passed away on December 27, 1991. He was educated at Stanford University and received his MS in mechanical engineering at Caltech, Pasadena, in 1937, and a doctorate in aeronautics in 1945. From this period stems his friendship with Arthur Thomas Ippen (1907-1974), whom he joined at MIT. In 1946, Daily was appointed assistant professor of hydraulics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, and from 1949 to 1955 was there an associate professor and then appointed full professor of MIT until his retirement in 1980. Read more
1963-1965:
Léopold Escande, France
Léopold Escande was born on June 1, 1902 in Toulouse France and passed away there on September 13, 1980. He graduated as a mechanical and an electro-technical engineer from the University of Toulouse and there submitted a PhD thesis in 1929. From 1941 to 1972 Escande directed Ecole Nationale Supérieure of Toulouse and headed the Toulouse hydraulics laboratory. From 1954, he was in addition secretary general of the French National Science Foundation.
1960-1963:
Arthur Thomas Ippen was born on July 28, 1907 in London UK, and passed away on April 5, 1974 in Belmont MA. He graduated from Aachen Technical University as a civil engineer and received from Caltech the MS in 1935 and the PhD degree in 1936. He was from 1938 to 1945 an assistant professor of hydraulics at Lehigh University, and from 1948 professor of hydraulics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. Whereas Ippen worked in the 1930 and 1940s mainly in open channel hydraulics, he turned his attention later to coastal engineering, to saltwater intrusion, and to sedimentation processes. Ippen was also one of the founders of what we currently refer to as environmental hydraulics, which has a number of classic research contributions now. Read more
1955-1960:
Pierre Danel, France
Pierre Danel was born on October 19, 1902 in Roubaix, France, and passed away on September 13, 1966 in Grenoble, France. He graduated from Ecole Centrale in Paris and entered the hydraulic laboratories Neyret-Beylier and Piccard-Pictet in Grenoble in 1928, the cradle of the later SOGREAH laboratories. Danel headed these laboratories from 1933 and in parallel was a Lecturer at Grenoble’s Ecole Polytechnique.
1948-1955:
Lorenz G. Straub, USA
Lorenz G. Straub was born on June 7, 1901 in Kansas City, and passed away in his office on October 27, 1963. He was educated at the University of Illinois where he gained his PhD title in 1930. He stayed during the late 1920s as a Freeman Scholar at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Berlin and thus got acquainted with European hydraulics. During his early career, Straub was engaged with the design of dams and in the translation of a German book on navigation hydraulics. In 1936 he published a noteworthy research work on the Transportation of sediment in suspension.
1935-1948:
Wolmar Knut Axel Fellenius, Sweden
Wolmar Knut Axel Fellenius was born on September 10 in Viksberg, Sweden, and passed away on September 2, 1957 in Stockholm. He graduated as a civil engineer from the Stockholm Technical University in 1898 and then was a building inspector and chief of the Gothenburg harbor department until 1911. Fellenius founded there a hydraulics laboratory in the 1920s, and all through his career he remained a consultant as well. He retired as a professor in 1942.
Related
IAHR also has a special issue of HydroLink in 2005 on "IAHR 70 Years - and Its Presidents" that has the introduction of IAHR President from 1935 through 2003. Click here to download this special issue (in PDF format).
