Alan E. Vardy was appointed to the Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Dundee in 1979 and was Head of Department until 1985, when he began four years as the University Deputy Principal. He was then awarded an Industrial Fellowship by the Royal Society and SERC, enabling him to work part-time at Mott MacDonald in Croydon for four years, developing a long-standing wish to promote safety in operational road and rail tunnels. He has chaired five international conferences on Safety in Road and Rail Tunnels, two on Tunnel Control and Communication, and three on Aerodynamics and Ventilation of Vehicle Tunnels, and he has organised dozens of international seminars and workshops on tunnel operation and unsteady fluid flows. He has four degrees—BSc, PhD and DEng (Leeds), and DSc (Dundee). He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Dr. Arris S. Tijsseling received an MSc in Applied Mathematics (1986) and a PhD in Civil Engineering (1993) from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. He worked on water-hammer and fluid–structure interaction in pipe systems from 1986 to 1993 at Delft Hydraulics and Delft University, and from 1993 to 1999 at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Since 1999 he has been an Ass. Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research interests include water-hammer, fluid–structure interaction, multi-phase surges, sloshing, and the history of science. He is involved in the ASME Pressure Vessels and Piping conferences, and he has chaired the last two Pressure Surges conferences of the British Hydromechanics Research Group.