The Professor of Civil Engineering is a professorship at Trinity College Dublin. The chair was founded in 1842, thirty years before the establishment of the college's first degree program in civil engineering.[1] It is one of the oldest chairs in civil engineering at any university,[2] surpassed in the British Isles only by the 1840 establishment of the Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow.[3] It was previously styled Professorship of the Practice of Engineering in the mid-nineteenth century and Professorship of Engineering from 1960 to 1985. The title was restored to Professor of Civil Engineering in 1986 following the creation in 1980 of new Chairs in Engineering Science.[4]
Following the reorganisation of the School of Engineering into three departments in 1980, two new Professorships in Engineering Science were created. The Foundation Chair was retained by the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering.