Raf Somers

Engineer – Advisor / Project Manager, IMDC
Raf Somers is a Civil Engineer with 8 years’ experience in national & international projects in waterways, ports, coastal & offshore environments. His specialty is the structural & geotechnical engineering studies for all kind of structures in these environments such as dikes, quay walls, flood protections, (floating) wind turbines, artificial islands, (vessel induced) scour protections & subsea cables. He is experienced in project management as well as technical execution of these projects. Raf graduated with great distinction as Civil Engineer (Msc), Major Construction Design, at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2014. For his Master thesis, in collaboration with GeoSea (DEME), he studied hydrodynamic data of offshore jack-up platforms and started to develop a tool which calculates the leg-to-seabed impact forces.

After his studies, he started his professional career at Grontmij (nowadays Sweco) as a project engineer for road infrastructure projects. In 2015 Raf switched jobs to start at SBE Engineering Consultants, driven by his interest in structural, hydraulic & geotechnical engineering studies for waterway & port related projects. The most important projects were: HHTT Deep sea quay wall (Rotterdam) and flood protection dike & retaining walls on river Scheldt (Antwerp). Raf joined IMDC in 2018 as Engineer – Advisor & Project Manager in the Marine, Dredging & Port Engineering department. This allowed him to contribute technically to a variety of water related engineering studies & manage such projects, including offshore projects. He has a great interest in data analysis & innovation which he applies on projects and new internal developments as Knowledge Steward for Geotechnics. He has been technically involved as expert in projects related to processing & analysis geotechnical data, modelling of geotechnical structures, including fully probabilistic calculations of dikes, in Belgium, the North & Baltic Sea, Europe & Africa. Currently he is Project Manager of an engineering study of an Artificial Island in the North Sea.