ISSMGE President’s Newsletter
Dear colleagues,
Six weeks ago, in Vienna, the ISSMGE Council entrusted me with the presidency of this Society, and I have thought of little else since. I write to you now for the first time as President, with enormous pride and no small sense of the scale of what lies ahead: 92 national societies with more than 21,000 members, six regions, one shared discipline holding up, quite literally, the ground beneath everything else we build.
This is the first issue of a newsletter I will write to you regularly throughout my term, a way of staying close to you and to everyone this Society exists to serve. What has always struck me about ISSMGE is not any single achievement, but the sheer breadth of people it brings together, engineers and researchers, young and experienced, from every corner of the world, all drawn by the same conviction: that the ground beneath us deserves our very best thinking.
Today also happens to be my own country, Switzerland's national day. It is a small nation, home to four languages and a great many distinct cantons and traditions, and yet those differences give way to something shared, an identity built from that diversity rather than despite it. This Society works the same way: 92 national societies, each with its own history, language and character, choosing to stand together and become something larger for it.
In anticipation of the term ahead,
Lyesse Laloui
President, ISSMGE