Prof. Hehua Zhu is now the Distinguished Professor in Geotechnical Engineering of Tongji University, Changjiang Scholar Chair Professor of China, director of Engineering Research Center of Information Technology in Civil Engineering of the Ministry of Education of China. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mining Engineering from Chongqing University, in 1983 and 1986 respectively, and his PhD was awarded in Structural Engineering, Tongji University in 1989. He did his postdoctoral research in Geo-Research Institute of Osaka and Kyoto University, Japan from 1993 to 1995, and was a visiting professor at Virginia Tech, USA from 2011 to 2012 and a Humboldt Researcher at Bauhaus Weimar University, Germany from 2016 to 2017. He is the chair of Joint Technical Committee 2 (JTC2) under FedIGS (2017-present); vice presidents of CSRM and Committee of Tunnel and Underground Engineering of CCES. He respectively established Chinese National Institute: Information Technology and Application in Geo-Engineering, a branch of CSRME in 2015. He created an International Journal “Underground Space”.

His research interests are in Rock Failure Mechanics and Numerical Methods in Geo-engineering, Whole Life-cycle Design Theory of Tunnel and Underground Engineering, Infrastructure Smart Service System (iS3) Construction, Fire Disaster Prevention and Reduction for Underground Space. He was awarded with Humboldt Research Prize in 2015 and the T.H.H. medal at ICCES’13 in 2013, two second national prizes of Science and Technology of China. He was also a winner of Excellent Contribution of the Eleventh Five-Year National Sci-Tech Plan from NMOST.