Ir Professor Jian-Hua YIN is Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering. He is Emeritus Professor (Soil Mechanics), former Chair Professor of Soil Mechanics (2013 to 2024) and Distinguished Research Professor (2024-2025) of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).
He received both BEng and MSc (research type) in Chinese Mainland, and PhD from The University of Manitoba, Canada in 1990. Dr Yin has both industrial and academic experience. After had worked in consulting firms/research centre in Canada and Hong Kong, he joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at PolyU in 1995 as an Assistant Professor and worked at different ranks until December 2025 in CEE.
Professor Yin has served as a Vice-President of the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics (IACMAG, founded in USA) since 2008 and has been a Co-Editor of International Journal of Geomechanics since 2005. He received the “Mao Yi-Sheng Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering Youth Award” in 2000,“John Booker Medal” in 2008, “Chandra S. Desai Excellence Award” in 2011 and “Outstanding Contributions Medal” in 2017, all from IACMAG. In 2011, he delivered the prestigious “Huang Wenxi Lecture” in Chinese Mainland in 2011 and the “4th Distinguished Lecture” of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Division of the Canadian Geotechnical Society in 2024.
He was the first to propose a non-linear rheology theory for soils in 1989-1990, from which one/three-dimensional (1D/3D) Elastic Visco-Plastic (EVP) models were developed. His work of 1D/3D EVP models and their applications in consolidation analysis of soils (Yin and Graham, 1996) in Geotechnique (a top international journal) was considered a milestone contribution to Geotechnical Engineering from 1948 to 2008. His two methods, that is, an Elastic Visco-Plastic numerical method and a simple method, i.e. simplified Hypothesis B method, for consolidation deformation analysis and settlement calculation of soils have been adopted in “Canadian Foundation Engineering Manual” (5th edition, 2023), sole reference of “National Building Code of Canada” on design of foundations and geotechnical structures. Recently, his simple method has been adopted by a new Chinese national “Code for Marine Geotechnical Engineering Investigation”.
Yin-Graham's 3D Elastic Visco-Plastic model (3D-EVP) model has been adopted with minor modification in the most popular international finite element geotechnical software "Plaxis", where the model is referred to as the "Soft Soil Creep" model. Yin-Graham's 3D-EVP model has also been implemented in the Imperial College (UK) software package "ICFEP" where their model is named "ET", that is the "Equivalent Time" constitutive model. Thus, many in the international geotechnical community are using Yin-Graham's models for deformation/stability analyses of soft/viscous soils, supporting the notion that Prof Yin is the world’s leading scholar in the non-linear rheology area.
His EVP models and simple method have been adopted in two textbooks and five monographs and series books. Several universities in Australia, Hong Kong, and Chinese Mainland, etc. have adopted Yin’s non-linear rheology theory, EVP models, and simple method in their curriculums of undergraduate and graduate programs in Civil/Geotechnical Engineering.
As cited from the Chief Editor’s Editorial of the journal “Smart Construction and Sustainable Cities” published by Springer Nature in 2023, his invention of a transducer for direct measurement of effective stress in saturated soil solved “a centennially unsolved case” and was considered “an unprecedented achievement in the field of soil mechanics following Terzaghi’s seminal work”.
