Professor Sveinung Løset

The 2017 POAC Founders Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Professor Sveinung Løset.

Professor Sveinung Løset has a long and prominent history with POAC. He attended his first POAC conference in Fairbanks in 1987, and has since attended all POAC conferences, making the Busan conference his 15th. Sveinung organised the 2003 and 2015 POAC conferences at NTNU in Trondheim. Professor Løset is a distinguished leader in Arctic Technology. He obtained his Master in physics from NTNU in 1980 and worked in SINTEF/MARINTEK as a researcher and research manager. There, he started his Arctic research and in 1993 he received his PhD, also from NTNU. In 1994, he started teaching at NTNU, and became a professor in 1995. He gradually took over Professor Torkel Carstens' role as Norway's Arctic Technology professor and has since then developed NTNU into a world-leading actor within Arctic Technology.

Sveinung has always realised the importance of access to field work and been chief scientist on a number of research expeditions. He took teaching responsibility as Adjunct Professor at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), when the Department of Arctic Technology received the first group of students in the autumn of 1996. He stated that all his PhD students shall attend field work during their studies. International collaboration has been another corner stone in his activities. During his PhD, he visited and collaborated with colleagues at the NRC in Canada. Later, he engaged himself in numerous European Projects, developing a strong collaboration with HSVA, Aalto and others. The Russian-Norwegian research collaboration has been of special importance. Numerous Russian students from St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University and Moscow institute of Physics and Mathematics have spent one year at UNIS in Svalbard. In 2005 he was appointed honorary doctor of St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University, St. Petersburg. Industry relevance and contact with industry has been the third corner stone in Sveinung’s career. He has worked with industry in both research projects and JIPs. He received Statoil Awards 2004. Since 2011, he has been director for the SAMCoT centre for Research Based Innovation (Sustainable Arctic Marine and Coastal Technology) with 12 Industry partners, 9 Academic partners and two Governmental bodies.

In his research, Sveinung has addressed various aspects of how sea ice, icebergs and icing affect and govern operations and design of ships and structures in Arctic Marine environment. His research encompassed field work, laboratory investigations and numerical modelling. He has addressed topics such as iceberg drift and characteristics, sea ice mechanics and characterization, ice actions on fixed and floating structures and marine icing. Recently he has engaged him strongly in developing a science based and practical discrete-element based tool to simulate ice actions on floating vessels and structures, and started the spin-off company ArcISo AS together with colleagues.