Geosynthetics June/July 2019 - 48

IGS-NA NEWS
IGS NORTH
AMERICA
The mission of IGS North
America is to provide
leadership in advancing
the education and
research of geosynthetics,
in strong cooperation with
IGS, via:
» Organization of and
participation in technical
conferences, seminars
and workshops
» Development and
dissemination of tools for
geosynthetics education
» Recognition of technical
contributions and innovations
regarding geosynthetics
» Stimulation of geosynthetics
research and their applications
through the IGS-NA Awards of
Excellence Program

John McCartney, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE,
is professor and department chair
of the Department of Structural
Engineering at the University
of California San Diego and the
president of IGS-NA.

A chapter of the International
Geosynthetics Society

By John McCartney

McCartney letter and IGS-NA happenings

am excited to start my two-year term as the president of IGS North America. I am joined by an
active and engaged set of board members, including John Allen (president-elect), Ranjiv Gupta
(treasurer), Ben Leshchinsky (secretary and vice president), Kate Patterson (vice president), Bruno
Herlin (vice president), Tim Stark (vice president), John Lostumbo (vice president), Jie Han (liaison to IGS), Jon Curry (liaison to GMA) and Richard Brachman (past president). As the North
American Chapter of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS) and the learned society for geosynthetics in the U.S. and Canada, we are focused on providing leadership in advancing geosynthetics education and research to attain their appropriate and widespread use as engineering materials.
Our society has been successful in achieving its mission in the past two years due to the
hard work of the board, which includes several outgoing board members. I would like to thank
John Henderson and Stan Boyle on behalf of the society for their time and service. IGS North
America has also started a new management agreement with the Industrial Fabrics Association
International (IFAI). We are excited about the opportunities to work together with IFAI to extend
our message to the broadest audience. We would like to express our thanks to Minerva for its
management support over the previous three years.
We are currently contacting members to renew their membership, so please look for a reminder
email from IFAI or IGS North America or visit our website (www.igs-na.org). Also, if you were previously a student member, please consider joining as a full member. We are working to find new ways for
members to be actively engaged in the society and to support our members' professional development.
We look forward in the next year to supporting two major conferences on geosynthetics in
the Western Hemisphere. The first is the Geosynthetics Conference: CASE STUDIES, which will
run March 8-10, 2020, in Charleston, S.C., and the second is the GeoAmericas 2020 conference,
which will run April 26-29, 2020, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. One of our major efforts during my
term as president will be proposing to host the next GeoAmericas 2024 conference in Canada.
Our society had tremendous success in hosting the previous GeoAmericas conference in Miami,
Fla., in 2016. We also plan to work toward organizing our society's past technical contributions
to previous conferences on our website.
We look forward to continuing our recent success in hosting webinars. We recently started a
partnership with the Geosynthetic Materials Association (GMA) to host and archive webinars
on its platform. Members of IGS North America will receive special benefits in being able to
access and download webinar content. We have worked with several members to develop new
webinars, and if you are interested in delivering a webinar on a new topic, please contact John
Allen (john.allen@mineralstech.com).
You may have seen a recent announcement that IGS North America will be organizing the
third Educate the Educators (EtE) program in San Diego, Calif., Dec. 9-10, 2019. If you are
willing to help sponsor this highly successful event, please contact Richard Brachman (richard
.brachman@queensu.ca) or myself (mccartney@ucsd.edu).
Please feel free to reach out to me or the other IGS North America board members with ideas
for new initiatives that will help advance the mission of our society.
Sincerely,

http://www.igs-na.org

Geosynthetics June/July 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Geosynthetics June/July 2019