Person

Branco Ladanyi

1922–2022

Branko Ladanyi was born and educated in Croatia. After graduating in civil engineering from the University of Zagreb in 1947 and getting his PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium in 1959, he moved to Canada in 1962. He held academic positions in geotechnical engineering at Université Laval, in Québec City, and then at École Polytechnique de Montréal where he worked from 1967 until his retirement in 1994. His teaching and research in geotechnique and geomechanics, which he continued for many years as Emeritus Professor, focused on cold regions and permafrost engineering, rock mechanics, tunnels and foundations. He made remarkable contributions in all these areas. Professor Ladanyi was well-known as a pioneer of cold regions education and research in civil engineering. His work in northern climates, which he started in the early 1970s, contributed significantly to the development of field characterization methods for frozen soils and ice, and to the improvement of analysis techniques and design methods for civil engineering structures in cold regions. Several of these methods have been widely applied in practice in Canada, USA, Scandinavia and elsewhere. In addition to over 240 technical papers and many technical reports, he co-authored, with O.B. Andersland, the widely used book In Introduction to Frozen Ground Engineering (Chapman & Hall, 1994), which was updated in 2004 for the 2nd Edition (ASCE Press/Wiley).