Annual Report Year 2010 - Civil and Environmental Engineering

Emeritus Professor Jim Mitchell,
a member of the National
Academy of Engineering and
the National Academy of
Science, remains very active
with the department.
Geotechnical (from page 27)
professional engineering short courses and seminars
for ASCE, and served on major consulting
projects such as lead seismic consultant for the
Pevari Dam in southeastern Turkey and for
the seismic retrofit of historic Grace Church in
Charleston, S.C.
Matthew Mauldon continues to be
involved with the Cavern Design Team for the
planned Deep Underground Science and Engineering
Lab at the former Homestake Mine in
South Dakota. The current phase of activity is
aimed at designing underground infrastructure
needed for the proposed research.
Mauldon serves on the ASCE Rock Mechanics
committee and also on the ASCE committee
on Engineering Geology and Site Characterization.
He is on the editorial board of Rock
Mechanics and Rock Engineering.
Current research initiatives include work on
fluvial rock erosion and on subsurface response
to human locomotion.
Emeritus Professor Jim Mitchell is a member
of the research team for the Transportation
Research Board’s Strategic Highway Research
Program 2 project on Geotechnical Solutions
for Soil Improvement, Rapid Embankment
Construction, and Stabilization of the Pavement
Working Platform.
He organized and moderated a panel discussion,
“Research, Teaching, and Practice Interrelationships
in Geo-Engineering Development - Is
the Past a Prologue to the Future” presented at
GeoFlorida 2010 in West Palm Beach in February.
Mitchell prepared a PowerPoint summary
of the presentations, and it is available on the
ASCE Geo Institute web site. He presented
invited papers at three conferences.
Mitchell’s current consulting activities include
advisory panels on seismic remediation studies
for three embankment dams in California; membership,
along with Duncan, on the Blue Ribbon
Panel for review of the Eastward Expansion
of Craney Island for the Port of Virginia’s new
Craney Island Marine Terminal; evaluation of
mattress rock densification problems at the Deltaport
Berth 3 Marine Works in Vancouver, British
Columbia; participation on the design review
board for a large copper tailings storage facility
in Utah; and service on the technical advisory
board for the Elliott Bay Seawall Replacement
project in Seattle.
Adrian Rodriguez-Marek joined the
department in Fall 2010. At Washington State
University, he was active in various research
projects dealing with geotechnical earthquake
engineering. These projects will be continued at
Virginia Tech.
Among these projects, he worked on a
USGS project dealing with the development of
procedures for hazard analyses that properly
account for the contribution of site-effects on the
uncertainty of ground motions.
In addition, Rodriguez-Marek is leading a
large NSF-funded project involving five institutions
across the United States. This project
focuses on increasing the understanding of the
effects of surface topography on earthquake
ground motions and seismic risk. The project
includes the use of centrifuge model testing,
statistical analyses of existing databases, and an
extensive component of numerical modeling.
The goal of the project is to develop designready
tools to account for the effect of topography
on ground motions.
Rodriguez-Marek also participated in an
NSF-funded project to document several
landslide and liquefaction features of the 2007,
M w
8.0 Pisco, Peru, earthquake. The focus of
the effort is the study of a lateral spread feature
that could prove to be the largest such feature
documented in historical times.
28 | VIA REPORT | 2010