Roy Thomas Severn

Whilst playing for Wasps (Rugby) Football Club he met Professor Sammy Sparkes, also of Imperial College, who persuaded him to study civil engineering as a post-graduate, and also Deryck Norman de Garrs Allen, who became his PhD supervisor.

Allen involved Severn in the project, as part of which the pair visited several arch dams and spent a significant amount of time solving complex design equations on mechanical calculators via relaxation methods.

[4] Severn studied at the Royal School of Military Survey in Curridge, Berkshire and served in Egypt, Cyprus and Aden before his service ended and he was placed in the Army Emergency Reserve of Officers on 29 September 1956.

[3][8] The accurate modelling of embankment dams is difficult due to their mix of rocks and soil and little work had been carried out previously on their reaction to dynamic loading, such as was exerted by earthquakes.

[2][3] In the late 1970s Severn installed a 2m by 1m shaking table at Bristol and used it to derive a set of guidelines for the design of earthquake resistance in embankment dams, they were the first of their kind in the world.

[3][2] Severn became a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1981 and, in the same year, received the ICE Telford Medal for a paper co-written with two members of the Building Research Station.

[3] Severn was invited by the European Commission to co-ordinate the improvement and calibration of new shaking tables at the Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil in Lisbon, Portugal the Istituto Sperimentale Modelli E Strutture in Italy and a facility in Athens.

[10] Severn was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1992 for his services to civil engineering and in January 1995 he led a team of European experts to carry out a detailed study of structural failures that occurred during and after the Kobe earthquake.

[1][3] In 1997, Severn delivered the sixth Mallet-Milne memorial lecture (entitled Structural Response Prediction Using Experimental Data) for the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics, in London.