Honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen. Good evening.

It is a great personal pleasure to introduce Dr Mark Lee as this year's Glossop Medal Lecturer (Fig. 1).

Mark has a B.Sc. in geography from the University of Durham and an M.Sc. from the National College of Agricultural Engineering. Since then, in more than four decades of professional practice, Mark has developed a wide range of expertise and international experience, which he will share with us in his lecture this evening. In 2003, Mark brought his extensive knowledge together in a Ph.D. that focused on developing a framework for the risk assessment and management of coastal change and cliff instability.

Mark has presented and published his work widely. As well as journal papers, he has been joint author of a good number of books. I will mention just one. It has a particularly prominent place in my bookcase as an introduction to the discipline of engineering geomorphology. Its title is Engineering Geomorphology: Theory and practice. Published in 2007, it was a collaborative effort between Mark, Jim Griffiths and Peter Fookes, and is notable for the many illustrations within its 43 short but very readable chapters.

My first opportunity to work alongside Mark on BP's In Salah Gas export pipeline project in the Sahara Desert of Algeria. We then became part of a ‘geoteam’ that BP assembled for pipeline route work in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. It was fascinating to witness Mark applying his engineering geomorphology skills across many diverse terrains, including hot deserts, mountains and plains. Working with him in the field, I was always impressed by his ability to read the terrain, to understand and assess earth-surface processes, and to evaluate the hazards and risks they posed to a project and the wider environment.

Mark has applied his terrain skills to many other projects, notably on coastal and marine engineering and landslide assessments. For these and many other projects, he developed highly effective geomorphology maps and process models, using them to convey his understanding of geomorphological and geohazard issues to members of project teams, including myself.

In all of this, many people, including Mark, owe an enormous debt to three previous Glossop lecturers: Denys Brunsden, Peter Fookes and Mike Sweeney.

It now gives me great pleasure to invite Dr Mark Lee to give the Glossop Lecture for 2024 on the subject of ‘Landslide Risk Assessment: Radical Uncertainty and Engineering Geomorphology’.

DTS: writing – original draft (lead).

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.