Born in 1935, Fernando Olavo Franciss grew up in Rio de Janeiro and was educated as a Civil Engineer in the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He started his professional career in 1959 by being educated on applied geology by the late and distinguished Prof. Reynold Barbier at the Institut Dolomieu of the University of Grenoble, France. Ten years later, in 1970, he obtained his doctoral degree from the same university. A leading rock engineer, he has gathered a lifetime of international experience in civil engineering practice, often while crossing with other fields such as engineering geology, underground mining and oil reservoir engineering. From 1964 to 1980, he worked as a part time professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Until 1991 he worked at Sondotecnica, a reputed Brazilian Consulting Bureau, and since then as an independent consultant. Many now well-known Brazilian experts in civil, earth and water engineering start their professional career closely working with Prof. Franciss, a fact that pleased him very much.

During his career, Dr. Franciss has had the chance to devote part of his time to investigate the hydraulics of fractured rocks related to civil works, mining, oil and gas storage caverns and interactions of hydrothermal resources with dam reservoirs. He has accordingly developed a tensor approach to describe the hydraulic properties of fractured rocks and unique finite difference matrix-algorithms to model the hydraulic and hydrothermal behavior of randomly fractured rock masses.

He is member of the Brazilian Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, the Brazilian Society for Engineering and Environmental Geology, the National Academy of Engineering and the International Society for Rock Mechanics. He has won a number of prestigious awards in Brazil, and has written several papers and a number of books: "Soil and Rock Hydraulics" (Balkema, Rotterdam, 1985), "Weak Rock Tunnelling" (Balkema, Rotterdam, 1994) and a part co-authored with Manoel Rocha on Rock Mass Permeability in 'Structural and Geotechnical Mechanics' by W.J. Hall, Ed. (Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1976).