Robert Zimmerman

Robert Zimmerman obtained a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, and a PhD in solid mechanics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a lecturer at UC Berkeley, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Head of the Division of Engineering Geology and Geophysics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences, and is on the Editorial Boards of Transport in Porous Media and the International Journal of Engineering Science. He conducts research on the hydromechanical behaviour of fractured and porous rocks, petrophysics, fluid flow in porous media, rock failure and fracture, and on the relationship between microstructure and the physical properties of heterogeneous materials, with applications to petroleum engineering, underground mining, radioactive waste disposal, and subsurface carbon sequestration. Prof. Zimmerman is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is the author of the following monographs and textbooks: Compressibility of Sandstones, R. W. Zimmerman (Elsevier, 1991). Fundamentals of Rock Mechanics, 4th ed., J. C. Jaeger, N. G. W. Cook, and R. W. Zimmerman (Wiley, 2007). Fluid Flow in Porous Media, R. W. Zimmerman (World Scientific, 2018). Fluid Flow in Fractured Rocks, R. W. Zimmerman and A. Paluszny (Wiley, 2024). Prof. Zimmerman has obtained over £20M in external funding over his career. Some major projects, as overall PI, include: 1. GeoSafe: Towards Safe Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste in Lower-Strength Sedimentary Rocks, NERC and Nuclear Waste Services (UK), Oct 2023-Sept 2027, £5M 2. Rock Mass Preconditioning for In Situ Extraction, BHP Billiton, Oct 2019-Sept 2021, £2M 3. HydroFrame: Hydrogeomechanical and biogeochemical processes in fractured rock masses in the vicinity of a geological disposal facility for radioactive waste, NERC UK, 2013-2017, £2.5M. 4. THERESA: Coupled thermal-hydrological-mechanical-chemical processes for application in repository safety assessment, European Commission, 2007-2011, €3M.

• Faculty of Engineering