David Muir Wood has been Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol since 1995 and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering since 2003.  He graduated from Cambridge University in 1970 and received his PhD from Cambridge in 1974 for research on the true triaxial behaviour of clays.  He lectured in soil mechanics at Cambridge from 1975-1987 and held the Cormack Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Glasgow from 1987-1995.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1998.
His research has concentrated on laboratory testing of soils and development of constitutive models for soils.  Programmes of testing have been performed in different apparatus including true triaxial, simple shear, directional shear and torsional shear hollow cylinder.  The observations from such tests have informed the development of constitutive models.  These models have incorporated the necessary features to make them suitable for nonmonotonic loading – such as seismic loading – and for natural structured soils but have maintained a simplicity of formulation.  This research feeds into the activity of the Bristol University Earthquake Engineering Research Centre and into more general studies of soil dynamics which include numerical modelling and physical modelling of static and dynamic geotechnical systems.
He has published two books: ‘Soil behaviour and critical state soil mechanics’ (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and ‘Geotechnical modelling’ (Spon Press, 2004).