Prof. S.W. Jacobsz

Dr. S.W. (Esve) Jacobsz is an Associate Professor of Geotechnical Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He graduated from the same university with BEng and MEng degrees and then worked at Jones & Wagener Consulting Civil Engineers before leaving for the United Kingdom to study towards a PhD in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research involved investigation the effects of tunnelling near piled foundations by means of centrifuge modelling. After his PhD studies he worked for Arup for one year on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link project in London and carried out post-doctoral research on the development of wireless displacement transducers for use in tunnels in a UK government funded collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He returned to South Africa in 2003, again working for Jones & Wagener before joining the University of Pretoria in 2010, where two years later he established a geotechnical centrifuge laboratory funded by the South African National Research Foundation and the University. His research interests are mostly in the field of unsaturated soil mechanics and include physical modelling of processes affecting the stability of tailings dams, sinkholes formation, the study of highly expansive clays and the application of fibre optic technology as means of leak detection on water pipelines in unsaturated ground. In 2023 he was appointed by the South African Department of Water and Sanitation to lead the investigation into the geotechnical aspects of the 2022 Jagersfontein Tailings Dam failure in collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand. The same year he established a mobile soils laboratory funded by Anglo American to undertake on-site triaxial and simple shear testing on sensitive tailings samples, avoiding sample disturbance associated with long-distance transport.