Prof. Mamoru Mimura is a Professor of Urban Management Division in the Graduate School of Engineering at Kyoto University.
The annual general assembly of the Japanese Geotechnical Society (JGS) was held on June 5th this year and he was appointed to the 36th president of the JGS, following the immediate past president, Prof. Jun Otani of Kumamoto University.
After he received his Master Degree in the Graduate School of Engineering at Kyoto University, Japan in 1983, he served the position of the research associate at Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University in the same year. He received his Ph. D degree in Engineering in 1991. Later in 1993, he was promoted to Associate Professor at Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University, and became a full professor at the Graduate School of Engineering of Kyoto University.
His research interest is firstly constitutive modeling for soft clays and numerical analysis for stress and deformation of soft ground, which is his doctoral topics. This research has been applied to the assessment of long-term settlement of the reclaimed marine foundations of the Kansai International Airport. Later, he started to work on the development of Radio-Isotope Cone penetrometers (RI-Cones) that can detect a wet density and water content of soils continuously with depth during penetration. In fact, RI-Cones have successfully applied to the quality control of the reclaimed foundations not only in Japan but also in various countries. Then, he initiated a new research topic of “Urban Geoinformatics”. A high-quality database system consisting mainly of boring information has been developed around metropolitan areas. This sophisticated databases are utilized for earthquake damage estimation and regional disaster mitigation plans for national as well as local governments in Japan. As an interdisciplinary study, he is involved in the conservation of historical ground ruins. From an engineering point of view, he is repairing and maintaining the burial mounds that have remained for over 1000 years.
He has been in charge of duties under ISSMGE, for which he is a Chairperson of ATC10 (Urban Geoinformatics) and a Secretary of ATC19 (Geo-Engineering for Conservation of Cultural Heritage and Historical Sites) whose Chair is Dr. Yoshinori Iwasaki.
As his role of the president of JGS, he has set out the following terms of reference: