Torgeir Moan (born 2 June 1944) is a Norwegian engineer and professor emeritus of marine technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. His research has focused on the structural analysis, design and safety assessment of marine and offshore structures, including ships, oil platforms, offshore wind turbines and floating bridges.
Education and career Moan was born in Malvik Municipality on 2 June 1944. He completed his engineering degree in 1968 and his doctorate in 1975, both at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, which was later merged into NTNU. He was appointed professor at NTH in 1978 and remained on the faculty after the institution became NTNU in 1996. At NTNU, Moan served as head of the Department of Marine Technology, sat on the university's board of directors, and was the founding director of the Centre for Ships and Ocean Structures (CeSOS), a Norwegian Centre of Excellence based at NTNU. He is currently a senior adviser to the Centre for Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (AMOS), the successor centre that took over much of CeSOS's research portfolio. He has authored or co-authored more than 700 journal and peer-reviewed conference papers and the textbook Stochastic Dynamic Analysis of Marine Structures. He has supervised more than 80 doctoral candidates over the course of his career and was editor of the journal Marine Structures for 18 years.
Public service and inquiries Moan served on the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Alexander L. Kielland accident of 1980, in which the collapse of a semi-submersible drilling rig in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea killed 123 people. He delivered the first Robert Bruce Wallace Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 1981 on the engineering findings of that inquiry. He has also sat on various accident inquiries and on standardisation committees for offshore structures (ISO), wind turbines (IEC) and floating bridges for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA).
Honours and awards In 2016 Moan received the Dr. Kenneth S. M. Davidson Medal of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, awarded biennially for "Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Ship Research". The medal was presented at the SNAME Annual Meeting in Seattle on 3 November 2016. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the United Kingdom (elected 1994), a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in the section for technological sciences, a member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In 2014 he received an honorary doctorate from Aalto University in Finland. Other recognitions include the first Robert Bruce Wallace Award at MIT, the Statoil Research Prize, the James W. Rice Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the SOBENA International Award from the Brazilian Society of Naval Engineers. For five years Moan served as the inaugural adjunct Keppel professor at the National University of Singapore, and he holds honorary academic positions at several Chinese universities, including Harbin Engineering University, Dalian University of Technology, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tsinghua University.
References
External links NTNU staff page Curriculum vitae (2012)