Landslide Assessment via the Vardoulakis Friction Model

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with
Manolis Veveakis 
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Duke University

ABSTRACT
Deep-seated landslides represent extensive slope failures that often exhibit prolonged temporal development, culminating in abrupt, largely unanticipated collapse events. Given their substantial scale and typically catastrophic outcomes, deep-seated landslides present a notable societal risk, particularly concerning economic losses and human casualties. Manolis Veveakis’s study addresses the modeling of deep-seated landslides using a combination of physics-based modeling, in-situ monitoring and material testing, remote sensing and data-driven approaches to constrain the physics governing the landslides, offer prediction and mitigation capabilities, and create hazard maps. In this talk, Veveakis provides a summary of over two decades of work assessing landslide hazards since the inception of the concept of frictional heating in landslides by Ioannis Vardoulakis in the early 2000s. 

SPEAKER
Manolis Veveakis is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment (Elsevier). Before joining Duke University, he was a Senior Lecturer at UNSW’s School of Petroleum Engineering and a Research Scientist in CSIRO’s Division of Earth Sciences and Resource Engineering. Veveakis holds a Diploma in Applied Mathematics and Physics, a MEng in Materials Engineering, an MSc in Applied Mechanics and a Ph.D. in Geomechanics, all from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece).