The ISRM Board has discussed a number of initiatives to be implemented in the short term, in order to give more benefits to the members and to serve better the rock mechanics community. One of them, which will start very soon, is the ISRM Online Lectures Series. Experts in different fields of rock mechanics will be invited to give a lecture on a specific topic. Each lecture will be broadcast from the ISRM website at a predefined date and time, and the attendees will be able to ask questions to the lecturer by e-mail, on the topic of the lecture, during the subsequent 48 hours. The ISRM Online Lectures will remain available on the ISRM website in a dedicated webpage.

Our plans are to organise four Online Lectures per year. The first one will be broadcast on 19 February, at 10 a.m. GMT, and it will remain online so that those those unable to attend at this time will be able to do it later. In order to know what is the correspondence between GMT and your local time, just look for GMT in your Internet search engine.

For the first Online Lecture the ISRM President decided that it would be a good opportunity to listen to the developments in the well-known New Austrian Tunnelling Method, now that it formally completed 50 years of existence. The invited speaker will be Prof. Wulf Schubert from Austria, and the title of his lecture will be "50 years NATM – from a construction method to a system".

Prof. Schubert is head of the Institute for Rock Mechanics and Tunnelling at the Graz University of Technology, where he teaches in the Bachelor and Master program, as well as in the post-graduate course “NATM Engineer”. Under his guidance about 70 Master theses and 20 PhD theses have been prepared. Besides the University activities he consults on international projects as a partner of 3G – Gruppe Geotechnik Graz Consulting Engineers. He served as Vice President at Large for the ISRM from 1999 to 2003 and is President of the Austrian Society for Geomechanics since 2007.

 From Newsletter of ISRM.