It is very evident today that geotechnical engineering is faced with a range of challenges of increasing complexity and scope. Efforts have been made in industry and in academia to address some of these challenges, contributing to the development of a current and future safe, sustainable and resilient society. This Rankine Lecture focusses on the development of robust predictive tools to underpin the geotechnical design concerned with the lifecycle assessment of a range of infrastructure, illustrated by specific examples from the Speaker’s research. The key for these developments is in integrating, in a consistent manner, ground characterisation with rigorous computational analysis and validation through field monitoring. The lecture has several parts, focusing on research that supports nt of renewable energy sources; and environmental impacts of thermal and chemical perturbations in the ground on geotechnical infrastructure. Lidija Zdravković is Professor of Computational Geomechanics at Imperial College London, where she has been an academic staff member since 1996, becoming full professor in 2013. She has been Head of the Geotechnics division in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department since 2014. Her research integrates soil characterisation and numerical modelling to assess geotechnical infrastructure, climate change impact, offshore foundations, energy geostructures and nuclear waste disposal, recently expanding her interests to data science and machine learning. She has consulted on a number of major infrastructure projects and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She has published over 250 technical papers and has been awarded prizes from BGA and ICE and the 2019 Imperial College President’s Medal for Excellence in Education. She takes on the role of Géotechnique Editor-in-Chief from January 2024. Show more