ICE and Ordem dos Engenheiros Bilateral Summit

David Porter

David Porter is director of engineering with the Department for Infrastructure, which is Northern Ireland’s highways authority. In this role, he is also the chief highways engineer and head of the civil engineering profession in the Northern Ireland civil service.

Porter is responsible for the development of the department’s professional and technical staff, engineering policies and standards, and health and safety. He also leads on procurement and the internal consultancy.

Previously, he was chief executive of the Rivers Agency, Northern Ireland’s flood defence and drainage authority.

Porter has served on the ICE Council three times, twice as the Northern Ireland representative and once as a general member. He is a trustee who, until recently, held the learning society portfolio. He has also served on several institution committees and panels.

A fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering, Porter was awarded the Poskitt Medal by ICE Northern Ireland in 2017 and the President’s Award by Engineers Ireland in 2018.

Humberto Varum

Humberto Varum is a professor at the Civil and Georesources Engineering Department of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (Portugal). With a career spanning 30 years, working at the intersection of teaching, research and practical implementation he focuses on the assessment, strengthening and repair of structures, earthquake engineering and the conservation of historic assets.

Varum is an Integrated Member of the CONSTRUCT research unit: Institute of R&D in Structures and Construction (Portugal) and is the President of the board of the Institute for Sustainable Construction (ICS) of the University of Porto. Previously a national expert seconded to the European Laboratory for Structural Assessment (ELSA), of the Joint Research Centre, Varum is currently an expert member of the International Scientific Committee of Earthen Architectural Heritage (ISCEAH) of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).

Having held visiting professor positions at University College London (UCL), the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (Italy), and Fuzhou University (China), Varum’s international expertise includes post-earthquake field reconnaissance missions such as L’Aquila (Italy, 2009), Lorca (Spain, 2011), Emilia-Romagna (Italy, 2012), Gorkha (Nepal, 2015) and Puebla (Mexico, 2017).

Varum is currently the President of the National College of Civil Engineering of the Ordem dos Engenheiros (Portugal) and a member of the Executive Board of the European Council of Civil Engineers (ECCE). He is also a member of the Portuguese and Mexican Academies of Engineering.

Daniel Reader

Daniel Reader has worked in the tunnelling sector for 20 years building his career at Arup and previously at Mott MacDonald. Daniel has extensive experience building and leading multidisciplinary teams in design offices and on construction sites.

Roles have included planning, managing and delivering design, from feasibility through to detailed design, and construction supervision on major international tunnelling projects including: Tarbela Dam 4th Extension (Pakistan); Elizabeth line Liverpool Street station (London); Shuakhevi hydropower project (Georgia); and most recently, High Speed 2 (United Kingdom).

Aside from his project duties, Daniel is committed to supporting the wider industry with a focus on developing the next generation of engineers. This includes being a Supervising Civil Engineer (SCE) to graduates aiming for professional qualification (chartership), apprentice mentorship, and outreach to high-school and university students. In 2023 and 2024, he was a judge on the NCE Tunnelling Awards in London.

Daniel is a Fellow of the ICE and is currently serving as the ICE Representative for Portugal. He is also a member of the Ordem dos Engenheiros (Portugal) and the IMechE (UK).

John Osborne

John Osborne is a senior civil engineer working at CERN, the underground particle physics research laboratory close to Geneva, Switzerland.

He studied at Liverpool University where he graduated with a civil engineering degree in 1988. He joined Tarmac Construction to work mostly on underground projects such as the immersed tube tunnels at Conwy and Medway. John worked on the Jubilee Line extension at Canary Wharf before leaving the UK to join CERN in 1998.

John started at CERN as a Project Manager for the client on the Large Hadron Collider, in particular, on the underground and surface works needed to house one the large detectors called CMS. This £100million worksite consisted of two 100m deep shafts and several large caverns and was completed in 2005.

John now manages a team responsible for civil engineering and infrastructure studies for large scale future physics projects. These have included the 100km Future Circular Collider (FCC) at CERN, the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) and the International Linear Collider (ILC) in Japan.

John is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), a member of the judging panel at the annual UK New Civil Engineer Tunnel Awards and the Switzerland Country Representative for the ICE.

Jon Banyai

Jon is a highly experienced tunnelling engineer who has worked on all types of tunnels, around the world – ranging from pipejacks to Sprayed Concrete Lined tunnels, from segmental linings to immersed tubes. 

He started his career in the UK working as a consultant before relocating to Copenhagen, Denmark, 15 years ago.  He has worked on many major projects in the UK and abroad, including Heathrow Terminal 5, Crossrail, the Fehmarnbelt tunnel between Denmark and Germany, and the Marieholm immersed tube tunnel in Sweden.  Jon has supported Copenhagen Metro on projects since 2012, for the M3 Cityringen, the M4 line, and now the future M5 line and the M4 extension.

Jon graduated from UCL in 2001.  

Jon is also the ICE’s Country Representative for Denmark.