Annual Report Year 2009 - Civil and Environmental Engineering

PROGRAM AREAS
GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
Russell Greene is working on several
NSF earthquake engineering projects.
Geotechnical expertise solves a myriad of pressing issues
Faculty, staff, and students within the
Geotechnical Engineering Program
continued to excel in teaching and
research, and have applied their technical
expertise in solving pressing national and
international issues.
Brief descriptions of each faculty member’s
activities over the past year are presented
below.
Adrian Rodriguez-Marek will join the
group as an associate professor in August
2010. He has expertise in the areas of
seismic hazard analysis, site response
analysis, soil-structure interaction and
post-earthquake field reconnaissance.
Tom Brandon has continued focusing
both his research and professional efforts
on projects dealing with the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers.
He currently has research projects with
the New Orleans District and the Engineering
Research and Development Center
(ERDC) investigating the interpretation
of cone penetration tests in organic clays,
methods of underseepage analysis for
levees, behavior of organic-rich fills, and
undrained strength interpretation for stability
assessment.
He also was involved in training ERDC
technicians regarding automated consolidation,
direct shear, and triaxial testing.
Brandon is a member of the Mississippi
Valley Division’s Geotechnical and Construction
QA Teams, and a member of the
Geotechnical Criteria Application Team.
With Mike Duncan, he taught a two-day
short course at Virginia Tech sponsored
by the CGPR in December on shear
strength and slope stability.
Joe Dove continued his emphasis on
multidisciplinary research to develop and
deploy technologies that improve productivity
while promoting sustainability and
adding value to professional services.
He is collaborating with Patricia Dove,
professor of geosciences, and Adam
Wallace, a post doctoral fellow in geosciences,
Craig Shillaber and Kyle Blakley,
both Via fellows, to develop a novel, biologically
inspired method to improve the
engineering behavior of soil.
Dove is also working with software engineer
Brian Badillo using National Science
Foundation (NSF) support to further develop
the software package geotechnical
Visualization Tools (gVT). This software
allows extraction of engineering data from
terrestrial LiDAR equipment scans and is
being used by a major contracting company
for mapping and monitoring of tunnel
excavations.
Other areas of active research include
Continued on page 31
30 | VIA REPORT | 2009