2026 Schnabel Engineering Lecture: Bayesian Thinking in Geo-Engineering

Abstract

The statistics you took in college is mostly worthless in geotechnical practice, but that is probably not a surprise. ‘Classical’ statistics doesn’t address the uncertainties that geotechnical engineers actually deal with, which are mostly epistemic: limited knowledge, changed site conditions, approximate models, too few data, and engineering judgment. The good news is that Bayesian Thinking provides a method for dealing with these epistemic uncertainties, and most geotechnical engineers are intuitively Bayesian so the approach is easily applied in practice. Project examples arising in site characterization, dam safety, systems risk analysis, and reliability will be discussed, along with the emblematic observational approach of Terzaghi which is a purely Bayesian concept.