The 5th annual UC Berkeley Geotechnical Engineering Symposium was held on November 12, 2021, at the Banatao Auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall. The annual symposium was organized by the GeoEngineering Graduate Student Association at UC Berkeley and hosted by Brittany Russo, a Ph.D. student working with Professor Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos. There were 143 registered participants for the event across academia and industry, making it the largest in-person GeoSymposium.

The keynote speakers for the event were five Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers in the GeoSystems group at UC Berkeley. They presented on a wide range of topics showing the diversity in research in GeoSystems. The presenters and the title of their presentation were:

• Franklin Olaya, a Ph.D. candidate working with Professor John Bray,    on "Strain Potential Relationships for Liquefied Soil Using a Laboratory Test Database"

• Dayu Apoji, a Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Kenichi Soga, on "Machine Learning for EPBM Tunneling"

• Jongchan Kim, a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos and Professor Dimitrios Zekkos, on "Cyclic Simple Shear Response of Well-Graded Sandy Gravel in Constant Volume Conditions: Liquefaction at Port of Wellington, New Zealand"

• Peng Tan, a Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Nick Sitar, on "Parallelized Level-Set Discrete Modeling of Naturally Deposited Fabric of Sand"

• Peter Hubbard, a Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Kenichi Soga and co-advised by Professor James Rector, on "Towards Near Surface Tomography using Distributed Acoustic Sensing"

Successful networking and poster event were followed by an industry panel. Three prominent engineers from the industry, Uri Eliahu from ENGEO, Pawan Kumar from Arup, and Mike George from BGC Engineering, gave their insight on the topic of "Big Data collection, management, and visualization in Geotechnical Engineering." 

The event was followed up by a successful tour of the new joint lab, the GeoSystems Sensing and Analytics Lab (GeoSAL), showcasing the new field equipment deployment center and our different field equipment capabilities.

The event ended with a social hour at LaVal's Pizzeria in Berkeley which was sponsored by the San Francisco Geotechnical Institute (SFGI) allowing for a continued networking session between UC Berkeley students and industry.