H. Bolton Seed Award Lecture
Monday, March 9 | 5:00 – 6:30 pm
Deformation Modeling in Risk Analyses for Dams
Ross W. Boulanger, Ph.D., P.E., NAE, F.ASCE
Ross Boulanger is a geotechnical consultant and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia in 1986, followed by his Master's and Doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley. His tenure at UC Davis from 1992 through 2023 included 14 years as Director of the Center for Geotechnical Modeling and its national shared-use centrifuge facilities. He has over 300 publications, primarily related to liquefaction and its remediation, seismic performance of dams and levees, and seismic soil-structure interaction. His consulting activities include service as a technical review board member or technical specialist for over 80 dam, tunnel, and other infrastructure projects. His previous honors include the Casagrande Award, Huber Prize, Norman Medal, and Peck Award from ASCE, the Ishihara Lecture from ISSMGE, and election to the US National Academy of Engineering.
Shamsher Prakash Lecture
Tuesday, March 10 | 5:00 – 6:00 pm
Beyond Site-Specific: Regional Near-Surface Effects for System-level Risk Reduction
Domniki Asimaki, Sc.D., M.ASCE
Domniki Asimaki, Sc.D., M.ASCE is a Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Her research integrates geotechnical engineering, computational mechanics, geophysics, and structural dynamics to investigate site response, soil–structure interaction, and topographic effects on seismic ground motion. She focuses on combining high-fidelity numerical simulations with field and experimental data to develop simplified, hazard-resilient design models for infrastructure at urban and regional scales.
Professor Asimaki earned her diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and her M.S. and Sc.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an Associate Editor for Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Earthquake Spectra, and Soils and Foundations, and is the recipient of multiple honors, including the ASCE Geo-Institute Arthur Casagrande Award and the Shamsher Prakash Research Award.
Karl Terzaghi Lecture
Wednesday, March 11 | 5:30 – 7:00 pm
The Safety of Slopes
D. Vaughan Griffiths, D.Sc., Ph.D., P.E., C.Eng., BC.GE, Dist.M.ASCE
D. Vaughan Griffiths PhD, DSc, PE, BC.GE, C.Eng, FICE, Dist.M.ASCE is a Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
His research interests lie in application of finite element and risk assessment methodologies in geotechnical engineering. He is the co-author of three textbooks on “Programming the Finite Element Method”, “Risk Assessment in Geotechnical Engineering” and “Numerical Methods for Engineers” that have gone into multiple and foreign language editions, and his papers on slope stability analysis are among the most highly cited in the geotechnical engineering literature.
He gives regular short courses worldwide to practitioners on finite elements, risk assessment and slope stability analysis. He was the inaugural ISSMGE Suzanne Lacasse Lecturer in 2016 and in 2017 received the H. Bolton Seed Medal from the ASCE/Geo-Institute. Also in 2017, he was named the Cross-Canada Lecturer by the Canadian Geotechnical Society. He gave the TH Wu Distinguished lecture in 2021, the Wilson Tang lecture in 2022 and was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in 2023 to collaborate on geotechnical risk-related research at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. He served on the Board of Direction of ASCE from 2010-2013 and was inducted as a Distinguished Member of the ASCE in 2020.
Ralph B. Peck Lecture
Thursday, March 12 | 1:00 – 2:30 pm
Revisiting the Observational Method
Kenichi Soga, Ph.D., NAE, F.ASCE
Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor in Mineral Engineering and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure and as a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
His research focuses on infrastructure sensing; performance-based design, monitoring, and maintenance of infrastructure; energy geotechnics; and geomechanics from micro to macro. He has published more than 500 journal and conference papers and is a co-author of “Fundamentals of Soil Behavior, 4th edition” with the late Professor James K. Mitchell and Professor Catherine O’Sullivan.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan.