IGS Ambassador Patricia Guerra-Escobar visited Bogotá recently to speak to members of IGS Colombia in the latest of their busy activities program.
Ms Guerra-Escobar, who is an IGS Council Member and chair of IGS UK, spoke on ‘Reinforced load transfer platform on piles using high strength geosynthetic’, at the event last month. Her talk was part of the chapter’s ‘IV International Course of Exploration, Characterization and Soil Improvement’ course.
Some 315 students, engineers and geotechnicians attended the program, which is staged every two years in Bogotá by the Colombian Society of Geotechnics (SCG). This year it was in collaboration with the National University of Bogotá.
Ms Guerra-Escobar’s participation was the latest in a series of activities hosted by a revived IGS Colombia chapter, which in 2019 began efforts to boost its initiatives, including improving training, increasing events, and devising new strategies for academic work, and standardization and regulation.
Previous events have included a course led by Professor Richard Bathurst, also an IGS Ambassador, on ‘Reinforced soil walls – design and performance’, in Cartagena in November, last year, and the first in-person IGS Educate the Educators (EtE) event for the Latin America region since the pandemic, in Bogotá in July, last year.
Francisco Pizarro, chair of the IGS Pan-American Regional Activities Committee, said: “We were delighted to welcome Patricia to speak. The course was part of a series of actions focused on strengthening our synergies with geotechnical societies in each country. It is one of the strategic aims of the IGS to help achieve a high level of dissemination between sister societies.”
Chapter President Mario Ramirez added: “It is very important to emphasize the importance of disseminating knowledge and good practices of the systems and technologies that include geosynthetics so we can achieve the best outcomes for Colombia’s infrastructure.”
For more on IGS Colombia, email Chapter President Mario Ramirez on geosinteticos.colombia@gmail.com, or visit the SCG website here.
+++ IGS Colombia is preparing to hold its next EtE event in Bucaramanga, Colombia, at the end of the year. For more details, watch this space.
