News

Dear Colleagues, We hope you're doing well. This is a friendly reminder to submit your abstract and register for the 15th Annual MPM Workshop hosted at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 5th-6th, 2024. Call for Abstracts: We invite you to submit an abstract for consideration for oral presentation at our event. This is an excellent opportunity to showcase and share your latest research findings and contribute to advancin ...

The Geosystems group at UC Berkeley is excited to circulate this new career opportunity for an R&D Engineer 3 to support our laboratory testing and field testing capabilities of the Geotechnical Engineering Testing Laboratories, the Geosystems Sensing and Analytics Laboratory (GeoSAL) and the large-scale testing of our Center for Smart Infrastructure (CSI). A detailed description of the position is provided here. If you are aware of i ...

Professor Dimitrios Zekkos will present the 14th Annual GZA Lecture hosted by the ASCE Metropolitan Section Geo-Institute of ASCE on the topic:  “Seismic Performance of Ports during the 2014 Cephalonia Earthquake: reconnaissance, field testing and numerical modeling"  The lecture will be held virtually on Thursday, February 15, 2024, at 6:00pm ET with 1 PDH offered. More information can be found here. You can regist ...

Prof. Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos was a guest at The Geotechnical Engineering Podcast (TGEP) hosted by Jared Green and supported by the Engineering Management Institute.  Prof. Athanasopoulos-Zekkos covered several topics, including the critical issues surrounding the liquefaction of gravelly soils and the importance of equity in earthquake resilience as well as what inspired her to become a geotechnical engineer! You can listen at ...

The seventh annual UC Berkeley Geotechnical Engineering Research Symposium was held on November 17, 2023, at the Banatao Auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall. The symposium showcased current research works in the GeoSystems Engineering group at UC Berkeley and bridged academic and industry communities.   The keynote speakers for the event were five Ph.D. researchers in the GeoSystems Engineering program. They presented their resea ...

The Geosystems program is pleased to announce that BGC Engineering has joined the program's Corporate Partnership at the Blue level. Through this partnership, BGC and UC Berkeley will establish strong ties and BGC will support graduate students in the Geosystems group. Matt Lato of BGC is the leading liaison along with UC Berkeley alumnus Scott Anderson. They will participate in a number of activities including the Industry Leadership Summit, ...

PhD student Weibing Gong completed his doctoral thesis in August and has already joined the Faculty of the Geosciences, Geological and Petroleum Engineering Department at Missouri Science and Technology as an Assistant Professor. Weibing's thesis was on "A Numerical Model for Regional-Scale Back-Calculation and Prediction of Earthquake-Induced Landslides" under the supervision of Professor Dimitrios Zekkos and Prof. Marin Clark from the Univ ...

Dr. Jongchan Kim, a post doctoral researcher working with Prof. Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos and Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos has accepted a faculty position at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology's Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. Dr. Kim has been working on the characterization of gravelly soils using the large size cyclic simple shear device at UC Berkeley and has made important contributions towards improvi ...

The sixth annual UC Berkeley Geotechnical Engineering Research Symposium was held on November 18, 2022, at the Banatao Auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall. The symposium showcased current research works in the GeoSystems Engineering group at UC Berkeley and bridged academic and industry communities.   The keynote speakers for the event were four Ph.D. and postdoctoral researchers in the GeoSystems Engineering program. They presented their ...

PhD students Drew Gomberg and Mirna Kassem, advised by Professor Dimitrios Zekkos, just returned from an expedition in Puerto Rico as part of a GEER (Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance) deployment. The one-week field deployment aimed to collect data about precipitation-induced landslides caused by the recent 2022 Hurricane Fiona. This was in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Puerto Rico (led by Prof. Alesa ...

Dr. Yong Liang (Postdoctoral researcher), Bodhinanda Chandra (PhD candidate), and Joel Given (PhD student) recently traveled to University of Texas, Austin to represent Prof. Kenichi Soga’s Computational Geomechanics research team at this year’s Material Point Method (MPM) Workshop.  The workshop provides an opportunity for researchers to present and discuss on-going work related to theoretical and computational developments in the MPM. A ...

The 6th annual Geotechnical Engineering Research Symposium will be held on Friday, November 18, 2022, from 1-5 pm at the Banatao Auditorium in Sutardja Dai Hall on the UC Berkeley Campus. The symposium highlights the research conducted by current Ph.D. students and Research Associates at UC Berkeley in the GeoSystems Group through spotlight presentations and poster presentations. To register, please follow this link: Register Here & ...

  Lookig Weibing Gong presenting results of a regional co-seismic landslide model for the 2020 Puerto Rico earthquake.    Professor Dimitrios Zekkos and his group, including PhD students Weibing Gong, Parker Blunts, and Mirna Kassem, participated in an expedition in Puerto Rico in May 2022. The expedition included a one-week landslide hazard workshop with colleagues from NASA, USGS, the University of ...

The Geosystems program and the UC Berkeley’s Center for Smart Infrastructure are excited to announce that they acquired Cornell University's soil-pipeline-fault rupture interaction testing apparatus. The apparatus was originally part of Cornell University's NEES facility and has for many years contributed immensely in gaining insights on the seismic resilience of pipelines through full-scale testing. Prof. Tom O' Rourke, Professor Emeri ...

Prof. Kenichi Soga is one of the selected State-of-the-Art speakers in the upcoming ASCE Geo-Institute Geocongress 2022 on State of the Art and Practice in Geotechnical Engineering. The conference is taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina on March 20-23 2022.    ...

In ASCE's Geo-Extreme conference that took place on November 7-10 2021 in Savannah, Georgia, Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos gave a keynote lecture on the Highway CA-1 failure at Rat Creek in the area of Big Sur that failed on January 28 2021. Zekkos co-led with alumni Prof. Tim Stark and Phil Gregory the reconnaissance mission under the Auspices of the Embankments, Slopes and Dams Technical Committee of the ASCE Geo-Institute. Several Cal st ...

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 i ...

Caption: UAV image of Nordhoff Ridge, CA study location.   In August 2021, a UC Berkeley GeoSystems Team consisting of Professor Dimitrios Zekkos, Ph.D. student Brittany Russo, and Ph.D. student Parker Blunts traveled to the Topatopa Mountains in the Transverse Mountains of Southern California for fieldwork. The work is part of an ongoing project funded by the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP). This work wa ...

The Geosystems program is excited to share the news that UC Berkeley and the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) are teaming up to launch a new research and innovation center that will apply cutting-edge technology to address infrastructure challenges our communities face due to climate change, aging systems and natural hazards. The new Center for Smart Infrastructure, which is led by Prof. Kenichi Soga with the support of Faculty from ...

Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos was a keynote speaker at the Third International Symposium on Coupled Phenomena in Environmental Geotechnics, an international event organized by the Technical Committee 215 on Environmental Geotechnics of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering.  The conference is held every four years, and was going to be hosted in person in Kyoto, Japan. Due to COVID it was postpon ...

The 5th annual Geotechnical Engineering Research Symposium will be held on Friday, November 12, 2021 from 1-5 pm in Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall.  The symposium highlights the research conducted by current PhD students and Research Associates at UC Berkeley in the GeoSystems Group through spotlight presentations and poster presentations. To register, please follow this link: Register Here Registration deadline is November 7 ...

Prof. Kenichi Soga and Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos are the main speakers in the upcoming event organized by the Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) of the National Academies on Multi-Scale Monitoring for Improved Infrastructure Safety, Resilience, Service Life. The event will explore ways in which new monitoring and data management technologies are making it possible to expand how we think about monitoring, and ho ...

Geosystems Faculty, Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos, Prof. Nick Sitar, and Prof. Rob Kayen were awarded a grant with the goal to incorporate Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) throughout the undergraduate and graduate CEE curriculum. The team will leverage VR and MR to (a) introduce students to ongoing research projects related to disaster response and engineering; (b) engage them on the course material covered; (c) conduct “hands-on” measure ...

Following the June 24th partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been conducting a full investigation into what caused the tragic event. As part of the investigation, Professor Rob Kayen and PhD student Parker Blunts traveled to the site this summer to collect Lidar data and Structure-from-Motion imagery. At Surfside, Ka ...

A GEER report was just published on the M6.4 earthquake in Petrinja, Croatia. The report presents results from the reconnaissance efforts of a large team of professionals from both the US and Croatia, following the earthquake in Petrinja on December 29, 2020. The report includes information on the tectonic setting of the area, the geology and geomorphology as well as the soil characteristics of the relevant and affected sites. It also presents th ...

ASCE just published a reconnaissance report on the failures of the Edenville and Sanford Dams that occurred on May 19 2020 in Michigan. The report presents the results of an investigation immediately after the failure using a range of techniques, includes geophysics, and optical and infrared UAV-based surveys. Work conducted at Cal also involved the digital image analysis of the video that captured the moment of the failure of Edenville dam, a de ...

The research done by the Soga Research Group on the application of AI and ML for tunneling is highlighted by Sixense Group. In brief, Dayu Apoji, a Ph.D. researcher in SRG, is trying to build “a brain” for tunnel boring machines (TBM) using machine learning algorithms so that this giant machine can make perception from enormous tunneling data (both from the machine sensors and ground instruments) and assist TBM operators and t ...

A team from the Soga Research Group led by Ph.D. candidate Peter Hubbard is working with a team from Malcolm Drilling led by Peter Faust to assess the performance of working platforms in San Francisco when subject to large loads from drilling rigs using distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS). A working platform is a layer of material that is placed on top of the existing soil to allow heavy construction equipment to perform their tasks ...

Caption: Students and Faculty performing seismic measurements as part of classwork   The Geosystems program has recently expanded its capabilities in Geophysics. Just last year, with the addition of Prof. Robert Kayen of the USGS, the Geosystems group has expanded its seismic geophysics capabilities that now includes capabilities in Microtremor Array Methods (Spatial Autocorrelation [SPAC] and frequency-wavenumber [ ...

The failure of Highway 1 at Rat Creek (Photo from Caltrans) UC Berkeley Geosystems program faculty and students are participating in a reconnaissance mission under the Auspices of the ASCE Geo-Institute Technical Committee of Embankments, Dams and Slopes investigating the January 28 2021 Highway 1 failure. Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos co-leads the investigation with UCB alumnus Prof. Tim Stark from UIUC and UCB Alumnus and President of Cal Engineeri ...

PressBanner, a publication in Santa Cruz County featured as a cover story on January 11 2021, PhD student Parker Blunts and his ongoing research on the monitoring of wildfire affected areas in Santa Cruz County. The research, funded by NASA, with the collaboration of USGS, involves repeated deployments of UAVs and with the assistance of Prof. Kayen, Lidar sensors, to create 3D models of the study site in Santa Cruz throughout the first we ...

The bay area has several active seismic faults. In order to supply water for its 1.4 million customers, the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) must maintain pipe infrastructure that cross these hazards. Prof. Kenichi Soga and his team have been working with EBMUD to develop a monitoring system for the most critical pipes in the east bay’s water supply network. Recently, a bending test was conducted at EBMUD’s Oakport stora ...

Distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS) can be used for a wide variety of applications. Among them, distributed temperature sensing (DTS) uses the physical changes in a fiber core, as observed by probing light pulses, to measure the temperature of the environment surrounding the fiber. This is extremely useful to measure continuous temperature profiles in the subsurface for geothermal exploration. Prof. Kenichi Soga and his team recently instal ...

Figure 1: PhD student Jhih-Rou Huang preparing for calibration testing during the summer of 2020. Jhih-Rou tested mine tailings from South America, as part of project led by Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos     A large diameter (d=300 mm) Cyclic Simple Shear device, or as we call her, LACSI, is operational and actively being used for testing all kinds of large particle soil specimens. Currently tests are being conducted on mine s ...

Associate Professor Dimitrios Zekkos led a Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Mission to document damage from Medicane Ianos. Medicane Ianos, a Mediterranean Hurricane, impacted Greece on September 17-20 2020. A total of 31 participants from 6 Universities, 3 governmental organizations and 3 companies participated in the effort. Among them, Parker Blunts , UCB Geosystems PhD student, contributed to the effort by creating 3D mo ...

The 4th GeoSystems Engineering Annual Research Symposium was successfully held on Friday, November 20th, 2020. The event was attended by 112 people, with the proportion between academic and industry/government of about 60:40, and the proportion between the UC Berkeley community and the communities outside of about 50:50. Different from the previous years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year the event was held virtually via Zoom.  ...