Professor James K. Mitchell has provided a large number of valuable contributions to the geotechnical engineering profession, covering a variety of disciplines and topics including: in situ testing, soil behaviour, earthquake engineering, soil liquefaction assessment, ground modification, laboratory testing, micromechanics, soil chemistry, and environmental geotechnics. During his faculty appointments at the University of California–Berkeley and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Professor Mitchell produced some 75 PhD students under his advisement and direction. His research efforts are well appreciated by the international civil engineering community, so much so that a special book was issued recently by the American Society of Civil Engineers entitled Selected Geotechnical Papers of James K. Mitchell: Civil Engineering Classics (ASCE 2001, edited by I.M. Idriss).
Professor Yu, Professor Mitchell, and Professor Jamiolkowski
To honour Professor Mitchell's outstanding contributions, the James K. Mitchell Lecture series was established in 2003 under the auspices of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (www.issmge.org), as proposed by Technical Committee TC 16 on Ground Property Characterization by In-Situ Tests (www.geoforum.com/tc16). In this lecture series that bears his name, we pay tribute to the many significant contributions that Professor Mitchell has produced towards the development and interpretation of in situ testing for geotechnical site characterization. A selected set of contributions on these topics in which Professor Mitchell either directed and/or participated in the efforts is given in . Spanning over 35 years, these range from theoretical formulations to experimental calibration chamber testing to field verification and implementation of existing and new penetrometers.
Table 1. Selected contributions on in situ testing by James K. Mitchell
The first J.K. Mitchell Lecture was delivered in 2004 by Professor Hai-Sui Yu of the University of Nottingham, UK, during the Second International Conference on Site Characterization (ISC-2, Porto) and was entitled ‘In situ soil testing: from mechanics to interpretation'. The second J.K. Mitchell Lecture, ‘Undisturbed sand strength from seismic cone tests', was presented in 2006 by Professor Paul W. Mayne of Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, at the GeoShanghai International Conference. At this time, it is planned that the third lecture in the series will be given in 2008 at the Third International Conference on Site Characterization (ISC-3, Taipei).
To make the Mitchell Lectures more accessible to the reader and also to follow a well-established geotechnical tradition, all parties concerned have decided that the Mitchell lecture papers should be published in Geomechanics and Geoengineering: An International Journal. The first Mitchell Lecture by Professor Yu is published in this issue and the second one by Professor Mayne will appear in the next issue.
Editors-in-Chief: Professor M. Jamiolkowski and Professor H.S. Yu