Dr. Marc Ballouz, Texas
President of the Institute for Geotechnics & Materials
Speaker on improving traffic, metro and highways

Marc Ballouz was born in 1965 in Beirut Lebanon. He obtained his high school degree from the French Jesuit school of Notre Dame de Jamhour. Despite the ongoing civil war at that time he pursued his higher education and got his Bachelor degree in Civil Engineering from the American University of Beirut AUB, Lebanon in 1987, then moved to the USA for his graduate studies and obtained his MS & PhD degrees in Infrastructure and Geotechnical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1994 with a 4.0 GPA.

He worked as a consultant in Houston Texas for 2 years before returning to Lebanon to start his own company, the Institute for Geotechnics & Materials in 1997. IGM was founded as a reference problem solver of engineering challenges, covering services from Lab testing to large scale construction projects. IGM has grown remarkably to international level and is known for its innovative Design/Build solutions in geotechnical, structure, & infrastructure engineering. Dr. Ballouz designed and executed over 150 large scale civil and geotechnical projects. In 2008, he returned to Texas, that became the main hub of IGM's activity. He is one of the rare engineers who are at ease in both: solving differential equations and driving a large drill rig. He is considered an international expert in Foundation engineering in difficult soil conditions for special structures such as bridges, high-rise buildings, wind turbines, shoring deep excavations, and stopping landslides.

In Parallel to his entrepreneurial ventures, Dr. Ballouz enjoyed teaching soil mechanics and foundation engineering courses at the Lebanese American University (LAU), Notre Dame University (NDU), and the Lebanese University (UL), in Lebanon for more than 10 years. Dr. Ballouz stays up to date attending conferences regularly, presenting his work, and continues to publish technical papers about Infrastructure research, deep foundations, landslides, and some interesting articles about general geotechnics. He is frequently invited to give lectures and seminars at renowned universities and at conferences worldwide. In 2016, he launched a webinar on "Challenges of Deep Excavations in Urban Areas" as part of the webinar series of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, ISSMGE. Recently, his invention ROBUST, to solve traffic jams by using a Rolling Bridge for Underground Systematic Tunneling, made waves on social media, was on the TV news, and is currently under patent and being on the path for implementation in the near future.

Alongside his career, Dr. Ballouz has been very active with ISSMGE and is now one of 12 Board Members of ISSMGE that was founded by Karl Terzaghi in 1936, and that currently has 89 country members with more than 30,000 geotechnical engineers under its wings. In September of 2013, during the 18th Int'l conference on Soil Mechanics & Geotechnical Engineering in Paris, Dr. Ballouz received the ISSMGE Outstanding Public Relations Award (seen here) because of his role in promoting geotechnical engineering. In fact if you Google search on the internet for "What is Geotechnical Engineering" two of the items listed at the top with the highest traffic, are his creations including the website www.whatisgeotech.org & the Youtube video.

Dr. Ballouz spends most of his time in Austin Texas where he resides with his family, but travels a lot across the USA and to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe as part of his work management. He is fluent in 3 languages (English, French, and Arabic). He is a fan of sports and exotic cars, and enjoys outdoor sports and activities such as hiking and hunting (Gold medal at the Lebanese inter-Universities championship in trap shooting in 1985), skiing (Bronze medal at the Lebanese inter-Universities freestyle championship in 1986), and likes dancing (Second place in Lebanese championship of Disco & Break dance in 1986), parasailing, waterskiing, etc..