Scott Steedman

Robert Scott Steedman CBE, FREng, FICE (born 10 September 1958) is a British engineer, former academic, TV presenter and standards expert. He is currently Director-General, Standards at BSI Group, the UK's national standards body. Education Son of Robert Russell Steedman, Scottish architect and partner of Morris and Steedman Architects, and Susan Elizabeth Sym, Steedman was educated at the Edinburgh Academy from 1963 to 1976. He read civil and structural engineering at Manchester University (UMIST) gaining a BSc Hons (1st Class) in 1980. He went on to Cambridge University (Queens’ College) where he was awarded an MPhil degree in soil mechanics in 1981. He continued his research at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and was awarded a PhD degree in 1984 for his work on the effects of earthquakes on retaining walls. Early career Steedman was appointed as a lecturer in engineering at the University of Cambridge and elected a fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge in 1983. His research focus was geotechnical earthquake engineering, studying problems of liquefaction and soil-structure interaction using the centrifuge facility in the Department of Engineering to build and test scale models of walls, dams, levees and foundations using simulated earthquake shaking under high acceleration fields. Later with Andrew Schofield, Steedman commissioned a large centrifuge facility in 1995 in Vicksburg, Mississippi for the US Army Corps of Engineers' Engineer Research and Development Center designed to be used for similar civil engineering related research purposes. He visited the Mexico earthquake disaster in 1985 and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.