Mario Manassero obtained his Civil Engineering degree in 1980 at Politecnico di Torino and received his Ph.D. at the same university in 1987. He has been visiting professor at the University of Ancona (Italy) from 1988 to 1993, Ghent University (Belgium) in 1996, and at Colorado State University (USA) in 1995. Since 1998, he has been Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. Awarded Philosophy Doctor “Honoris Causa” by the Technical University of Civil Engineering, Bucharest Romania, September 23th 2021. Winner of the R.M. Quigley Award, for the best paper “On the intrinsic, state, and fabric parameters of active clays for contaminant control”, published on the Canadian Geotechnical Journal, 2019. Vice-President for Europe of International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, ISSMGE, (2017-2022). He has been Chairman of the Technical Committee (TC) no. 215 “Environmental Geotechnics” of ISSMGE for the period 2001 to 2014 and a member of the expert consulting board of the Italian Ministry of the Environment for the Environmental Impact Assessment of major national projects from 2008 to 2012.

His main research activities are devoted to the characterization of soil deposits by in-situ tests, soil improvement and reinforcement methods, containment systems for landfills and polluted subsoils, vacuum extraction of subsoil pollutants, and the mechanical behaviour of municipal and industrial solid wastes. He has also addressed more fundamental topics like the chemo-physical interaction between pore fluids and the solid skeleton of active clays, the multiphase coupled flows, and the associated subsoil pollutant transport phenomena. He has been invited lecturer in a number of international conferences and academic celebrations. Among them, it is worth to mention the State-of-the-Art Lecture on Environmental Geotechnics, at the Millennium Conference “GEOENG2000” jointly organized by ISSMGE, ISRM e IAGEA, Melbourne, Australia (November 2000). He has been appointed as the second R. Kerry Rowe Lecturer by ISSMGE TC 215 and the Lecture was delivered at the 19th International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ICSMGE), Seoul (Corea), 2017.

He was involved in many committees for the preparation of guidelines and regulations, at the national and international level, concerning civil engineering and environmental aspects and he was a member of the Italian Geotechnical Society Committee, AGI-UNI-SC7, for the National Application Norm of the Eurocode n. 7 “Geotechnical Design” (CEN). As far as his professional activity is concerned Mario Manassero was involved in many landmark engineering projects such as the protection of the Venice Lagoon, the reclamation and rehabilitation of the Rome International Airport area, the stability assessment of the red mud tailing basin at Portoscuso (Italy), the pollutant containment diaphragm wall at Cengio (Italy), and the design of the Messina Strait bridge foundations and anchor blocs. He has also been geotechnical consultant of the Victoria State Environmental Protection Agency (Australia), contributing to the environmental planning for landfill locations as well as to the landfill design guidelines. He has authored, co-authored, and/or edited five books and more than 150 technical and scientific papers in journals and conference proceedings.