Ignatius (Po) Lam, PE, GE, Co-Founder

Senior Consultant

Mr. Lam was the co-founder of Earth Mechanics, Inc. and now serves as a Senior Consultant. As the author of several federal design guideline documents, Mr. Lam has been an influential leader in the effort to upgrade seismic design and retrofit guidelines for bridges for decades. He has over 40 years of geotechnical and earthquake engineering experience, with primary focus on seismic design and retrofit of major long-span bridges. He has served as lead geotechnical engineer on over 500 contracts for California standard bridges. He served as the geotechnical and earthquake engineering design consultant and PEER reviewer on numerous major long-span bridges, such as the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Spans, Tacoma-Narrows Bridge in Washington, and cable-stayed Cooper River Bridge in South Carolina.

Mr. Lam earned his M.S. and E.D. in Civil Engineering from Caltech, and is a licensed Civil and Geotechnical Engineer in California. In addition to numerous technical papers on foundation and seismic design topics, Mr. Lam has authored geotechnical and foundation design manuals for agencies including the FHWA, NCHRP, MCEER and ATC. These manuals continue to serve as important references for seismic design and soil-structure interaction for bridges.