Jason Ingham
Nigel undoubtedly had by far the most significant influence on my professional career of any of my mentors or teachers. In 1990 I arrived in San Diego to study with Nigel, as a naive young 23 year old research student having never previously left New Zealand, looking forward to spending a few years in California before becoming a professional structural engineer. Instead I have become a career academic and barely a day goes by when I don’t share with my own research students some of Nigel’s wisdom. Sometime I find myself saying ‘My supervisor taught me that …’ and for my students this is the end of the discussion – case closed, because it remains unthinkable that I would be advocating an alternative approach to the one that Nigel would have recommended.
When I arrived in San Diego I recall that there was some university paperwork for international students that required me to have a nominated guardian, and so of course the obvious solution was to ask Nigel if he would be my guardian. After a year in San Diego I had mastered ‘driving on the wrong side of the road’ and was ready to purchase a car. It transpired that Nigel wanted to sell his Volvo and so it was convenient for both of us that I bought his car. When I later opened the glovebox I found that Nigel had left behind some old ownership documents that recorded his date of birth and I realised that Nigel was very similar in age to my own father. So for these and many other reasons it remains natural
for me to think of Nigel as more than just my doctoral supervisor, and instead as a father figure. Soon after my arrival at UCSD I was designing my first experiment in the lab and labelled it ‘Specimen 1’. Nigel’s reaction was that ‘specimen’ made it sound like a urine sample, so to this day that word is outlawed in my research group and we only ever build ‘test units’ instead. On more than one occasion I have repeated the urine sample anecdote to my students and it always has the same effect on them as it did on me.
After about a year at UCSD I had an opportunity to make my first ever conference presentation at a Caltrans conference. The night before the conference Nigel asked several of us eager young researchers to drop by his room to discuss and practice our presentations, and I remember seeing a novel sitting on the bedside table in Nigel’s hotel room. It seems a bit comical now as I think back to more than 25 years ago, but at the time I remember it being quite a stunning revelation – Nigel seemed to always be so up-to-speed with any and every issue that I had somehow assumed that he spent all of his spare time absorbing vast amounts of technical literature. But instead, he was reading a novel!
During my studies at UCSD I recall meeting Michele a few times when he visited San Diego, and I was aware that Nigel was working with Michele and others on some new things in Italy, but it was only years later when I eventually managed to visit the Rose School in Pavia that it really dawned on me just how significant this achievement was. Whilst myself and the other students at UCSD where busy tackling our studies, Nigel was already looking well ahead to a whole new set of challenges and
an entirely new model for teaching earthquake engineering. Somehow this realisation made me think that it was ‘classic Nigel’, conceiving and implementing opportunities that people like myself cannot even see.
As I approached the end of my doctoral studies Nigel made a comment, on several occasions actually, that it was completely to be expected that at the end of a doctoral study the student should know more about the topic than does the supervisor. It is a comment that I completely agree with, and that I tell my own students from time to time. The problem is – I’m pretty sure that I failed this test because at the end of my doctorate I still felt like Nigel knew far more about what I was studying than I did myself,
perhaps because he ended up publishing his text book ‘Seismic Design and Retrofit of Bridges’ with Frieder and Michele soon after I graduated. My only consolation is that I expect that I was not alone, and that there were few people who knew more than Nigel about any subject where Nigel had invested energy into considering and solving the complex problems.
In October 2000 I was 5 years into my academic career and I delivered a presentation at the annual concrete industry conference at Wairaki in New Zealand. At the end of the presentation Nigel got up to ask a question and I recall feeling as if all the blood had just drained out of my checks. Sure enough, Nigel had some insightful comments to make but I recall a ‘deer caught in the headlights’ feeling
as I replied to Nigel by saying something like ‘I agree’ to avoid any further anxiety on my part. As I type this I can’t help but suspect that there will be others who recall a similar experience, as I have seen a number of young (and sometime not so young) researchers make what they no doubt thought was a very successful presentation, only to see Nigel raise his hand with a question and the presenter suddenly look a little panicked.
In 2011 I was a member of the management committee of NZSEE and I had the honour of reading Nigel’s Life Member citation at the annual NZSEE conference dinner. It did not begin to ‘balance
the books’ for all the wisdom and insights that Nigel had shared with me during my studies and beyond, but I was immensely pleased to have been able to speak publically about Nigel’s extensive
achievements and to present the citation to him. Soon afterwards I bumped into Nigel and Jan while we were all waited in the frequent flier lounge at Auckland airport. Having known Nigel for more than 20 years at this point, it seemed that I was able to finally relax in his presence enough to simply chat. Somehow we returned to the subject of his achievements, and Nigel made a comment along the lines that perhaps if he could do it all over again he might have instead chosen medicine as his career choice. I was gobsmacked – to think that one of the most preeminent thinkers within the realm of earthquake engineering in our lifetime could be so casual about his own achievements. But on reflection it was rather typical of Nigel, that he was always looking way beyond my horizons. Sadly, that was my last conversation with Nigel.
In closing I note that I regard Nigel as the most brilliant thinker that I have ever met, and that I consider myself to have been very lucky to have been one of his students. Thank you Nigel.