Harry Bolton Seed

Harry Bolton Seed
Harry Bolton Seed at the UC Berkeley Faculty Club in 1969.
Born	(1922-08-19)August 19, 1922 Bolton, England
Died	April 23, 1989(1989-04-23) (aged 66) Orinda, California, United States
Fields	Civil Engineering
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	King's College London

Harry Bolton Seed (August 19, 1922 – April 23, 1989) was an educator, scholar, former Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was regarded as the founding father of geotechnical earthquake engineering.

Harry Bolton Seed was born in Bolton, England, on August 19, 1922 into a family of a cotton mill manager. His father was Arthur Bolton Seed, and his mother's maiden name was Annie Wood; his sister Dorothy was nine years older than he was. He spent his childhood in Lancashire and attended Farnworth Grammar School, where he exhibited talent both at sports and academics. At the age of eighteen he chose a scholarship to King's College London over a possible professional soccer career. Seed's studies were interrupted by the Second World War, when he served the military as a lieutenant. After military service, Seed returned to the University of London to finish his study, and received a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering in 1944 and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering in 1947. His thesis title was "Non-elastic deformations in concrete and their effects on design". Seed also captained the University of London's soccer team, and the All-England team during this period. Following two years as assistant lecturer at King's College, Seed came to Harvard University to study soil mechanics under the tutelage of engineering giants Karl Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande. He received his S.M. degree from Harvard in 1948 and spent the next year as an instructor at Harvard, followed by a year as a foundation engineer for Thomas Worcester, Inc., in Boston.

In 1950 Seed joined the civil engineering faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he finished his career as an educator, researcher and consultant to public agencies and private businesses. He built up the geotechnical engineering program at Berkeley into one of the best in the world. He served as chair of the Civil Engineering Department from 1965 to 1971. He successfully guided fifty Ph.D. degree candidates to complete their dissertations during his career. He died of cancer at his home in Orinda, California on August 23, 1989.