Warren Distinguished Lecture Series

Banners that illustrate CEGE's mission and vision hang in the Charles Fairhurst Rotunda

The Warren Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by a generous, renewing gift by Alice Warren Gaarden in 1961. Since 1989, we have been bringing in accomplished researchers and speakers from around the world to share their work with students, faculty, and friends of CEGE. Please join us for these lectures!

Upcoming Events

Mar 15  Roman Y Makhnenko, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mar 22  Joseph Vantassel, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech
Mar 29  Elowyn Yager, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Idaho
Apr   5  Kyle Doudrick, Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame
Apr 12  Tim Strathmann, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Colorado School of Mines
Apr 19  Henry Liu, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan 
Apr 26  Dimitrios Lignos, Resilient Steel Structures Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),  Lausanne (Switzerland)

Subsurface Imaging and the Future of Geotechnical Site Investigation

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with 

Joseph Vantassel
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech

Abstract
Traditional geotechnical site characterization relies on interpolating between limited 1D measurements of subsurface stratigraphy to develop 3D engineering models for design. The sparsity of traditional 1D geotechnical measurements presents challenges in geological settings with rapid spatial variation (e.g., alluvial deposits) and/or anomalies (e.g., karst formations). However, on-going efforts continue to show that non-invasive seismic imaging methods can be used as a cost-effective means of improving geotechnical site investigation. In this presentation, Vantassel includes recent work to improve seismic imaging techniques for the problem of near-surface (i.e., depths < 30 m) geotechnical site investigation. Specifically, work on improving uncertainty quantification and accelerating data-processing with artificial intelligence (AI). The presentation highlights the application of techniques including the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio (HVSR), multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW), and full waveform inversion (FWI) to civil engineering challenges including post-disaster reconnaissance, seismic site characterization, and cryosphere monitoring.

Speaker
Dr. Joseph P. Vantassel earned his BS in Civil Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2016. For his graduate studies, Dr. Vantassel attended The University of Texas at Austin, earning his MS in May of 2018 and Ph.D. in December of 2021 in Civil Engineering. His graduate studies focused on the intersection of geotechnical engineering, geophysics, and computer science. After earning his Ph.D., Vantassel worked as a Research Associate in the Data Intensive Computing Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) until fall 2023. Dr. Vantassel is currently an Assistant Professor of Geotechnical Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. He leads a group focused on advancing subsurface imaging toward more-robust and uncertainty-aware solutions through the intersection of field experiments, numerical simulation, artificial-intelligence, and high-performance computing.

Explaining Variations in the Onset of Sediment Motion

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with

Elowyn Yager
Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Idaho

"Finding a Signal in the Noise: Using Turbulence, Bed Structure, and AI to Explain Variations in the Onset of Sediment Motion"

Abstract
Thresholds of sediment motion are integral to bedload transport estimates, which inform calculations of aquatic habitat, bridge pier scour, reservoir sedimentation, channel stability, and landscape evolution. Despite often being assumed constant, the critical Shields stress (stress needed to cause sediment motion), can vary by an order of magnitude between different gravel-bedded streams and even within the same river over time. This noise in critical Shields stresses obscures the mechanics of grain motion including the spatial and temporal variation of key processes that affect particle mobility. Using a combination of laboratory experiments, field measurements, and numerical modeling, Yager quantifies some of the key controls on particle motion. I specifically highlight the influence of flow turbulence and bed structure in controlling particle transport and incorporates aspects of these controls into a mechanistic theory. The theory is combined with simple photogrammetry and AI particle detection techniques to have an informed estimate of the onset of motion in any gravel bedded river.  Her results demonstrate that much of the noise in critical Shields stresses can be explained by including grain-scale mechanics in reach-scale estimates of sediment motion.  

Speaker
Elowyn Yager is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the co-director of the Center for Ecohydraulics Research at the University of Idaho. Yager obtained her BS in Geology at SUNY Buffalo and her Ph.D. in Geology at the University of California at Berkeley. Yager’s research is focused on understanding the mechanics of geomorphic processes from the grain- to landscape scale including sediment and nutrient transport, post-fire hillslope erosion, bedrock erosion, and interactions between physical and ecological processes. She has received several awards for her research, teaching, and outreach including a National Science Foundation Career Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. 

Past Warren Lectures

Shales as barriers for fluid flow in underground storage

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with

Roman Y. Makhnenko
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract
Tight shale-like formations are often considered as barriers for fluid flow in geo-energy projects, such as CO2 and H2 storage or deep disposal of nuclear waste. The appropriate shale formations should have high clay content and dominant pore sizes on the order of nanometers. Their sealing capacity is determined by high non-wetting fluid entry values, low permeability, and high ductility. The characterization of the hydro-mechanical behavior of shales is involved even when saturated with just one fluid because of long experimental times and high sensitivity to environmental factors such as temperature and pore fluid chemistry. The unsaturated poromechanical properties are even more difficult to measure since the solid, pore, and fluid compressibility should not be neglected and the degree of saturation should be controlled. Makhnenko discusses the results of a comprehensive laboratory characterization of a few shale-like materials with different porosity, permeability, and dominant grain and pore sizes. He is investigating the effect of mineral composition and presence of heterogeneities, including fractures, on sealing capacity of shales under varying effective mean stress, pore pressure, and temperature. Makhnenko presents the implications of using these shales as barriers for advective and channeled fluid flow, including CO2 injection, for representative in-situ conditions. 

Speaker
Roman Y. Makhnenko is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Makhnenko has a background in mechanics and applied mathematics. He obtained his MS (2009) and Ph.D. (2013) degrees in geological and civil engineering from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. From 2013 to 2016, Makhnenko worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) on the project related to assessment of geological storage of CO2. Currently, Makhnenko is developing a rock mechanics program at Illinois that includes modern high-pressure/high-temperature rock testing facilities and new graduate and undergraduate courses on the topic. His group is working on the geomechanical testing and modeling for geo-energy projects such as COand H2 storage and shallow geothermal systems.

Charting Technology Development Pathways for a Circular Bioeconomy

Guest introduces a standardized process—Quantitative Sustainable Design (QSD)—to identify, prioritize, and pursue opportunities for innovation to advance novel technologies and infrastructure systems. Leveraging examples from non-sewered sanitation and resource recovery, he walks through the QSD process.

Understanding Distributions of Traffic and Mobility Data

Models enable us to simulate and thus better comprehend the dynamics of the real world. Seongjin Choi explores two principal methodologies: Deep Probabilistic Forecasting and Deep Generative Model. Overall, Choi showcases the capabilities of both methodologies in capturing patterns and behaviors in transportation and mobility data.

Public Health Engineering at the Indian Health Service

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with Michael Termont, P.E., US Public Health Service 

Abstract
The Indian Health Service Sanitation Facilities Construction program is responsible for delivering engineering services for drinking water, wastewater, and solid waste facilities to American Indian and Alaska Natives. Providing these services comes with a unique set of challenges including adverse environmental conditions, limited suppliers, balancing high treatment demands with limited operation and maintenance personnel and budget to provide dependable solutions in order to raise the health of the disadvantaged Native American communities. Michael Termont will discuss some of the projects he has been involved in to highlight these challenges and the on-the-ground solutions he encountered working at the Indian Health Service.

Speaker
Michael Termont is a professional engineer in the US Public Health Service. He has worked for the Division of Sanitation Facilities Construction at Indian Health Service for over 20 years.  Termont has worked with tribes in South Dakota, Nebraska, Washington, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. He has held the positions of Field Engineer, Tribal Utility Consultant, and, most recently, the Deputy Director of Project Support for the Bemidji Area DSFC.  He has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineer from Iowa State University, and a Masters in Engineering Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a licensed professional engineer in the states of Washington and Minnesota. 

Eccentrically Braced Frames with Cast Steel Modular Yielding Links

The engineering community must incorporate more resilient structural systems to minimize or eliminate damage, loss of functionality, and downtime following major natural hazards. Mortazavi provides an example of this approach, the design and experimental validation of Eccentrically Braced Frames (EBFs) equipped with novel cast steel replaceable modular yielding links.

Panel Discussion on Circularity

The spring 2024 session began Friday, February 2, with a discussion about circularity and working toward a circular economy.
We welcomed these distinguished panelists:
1. Beth Tomlinson, Carbon and Climate Discipline Leader at Stantec, leads the carbon emissions reduction team
2. Della Young, CEO and Principal Scientist, started Young Environmental Consulting Group, which focuses on stormwater and water resource management and conducts educational programming
3. Michelle Stockness, Executive Director at the Freshwater Society
4. Sam Hanson, Joint Activities Manager at the Washington/Ramsey County Recycling and Energy Board

How Fracking Affects Our Water

Susan Brantley focuses on what has been learned over the last two decades about water impacts related to shale gas development (including fracking).

Multi-physics Modeling of 3D Printing of Metallic Materials

Jinhui Yan presents a sharp-diffusive interface computational method for simulating multiphysics processes in metal additive manufacturing (AM), focusing on better handling gas-metal interface, where metal AM physics mainly takes place. 

Inherent Resilience of Large Cities to Natural Hazard

The Inherent Resilience of Large Cities to Natural Hazards: Records, Evidence and Predictions

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with Nicos Makris, Civil Engineering, Southern Methodist University

Abstract
In the view that cities will continue to house the majority of the world’s population at an increasing rate, in association with climate change, in this seminar Markis quantifies urban resilience by examining the response history of the mean-square displacement of the citizens of large cities prior to and upon historic natural hazards strike. During the talk Markis explains how the mean-square displacement from a random (stochastic) process is intimately related to deterministic, emergent time-response functions. The recorded mean-square displacements of large numbers of cell-phone users from the cities of Houston, Miami, and Jacksonville when struck by hurricanes Harvey (2017), Irma (2017) and Dorian (2019), together with the recorded mean-square displacements of the citizens of Dallas and Houston when those cities experienced the 2021 North American winter storm, revert immediately to their pre-event steady-state response, suggesting that large cities when struck by natural hazards are inherently and invariably resilient. The significant number of records presented in this study also validate a mechanical model for cities, recently developed by the speaker, that is rooted in Langevin dynamics and predicts that following a natural hazard large cities revert immediately to their initial steady-state regime and resume their normal, pre-event activities.

Speaker
Nicos Makris is an internationally recognized expert in structural-earthquake engineering and structural mechanics-dynamics, and he is the Addy Family Centennial Professor in Civil Engineering at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Makris received his Ph.D. (1992) and Master of Science (1990) from the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. He holds a Diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University, Athens, Greece (1988). He has previously served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1992-1996); the University of California, Berkeley (1996-2005); the University of Patras, Greece (2003-2019); and the University of Central Florida (2014-2018). He has published more than 130 papers in archival journals and has supervised 15 Ph.D. thesis and more than 40 MSc and 5th year Diploma theses. He has served as the Editor of the journal Earthquakes and Structures; the Associate Editor and the Chair of the Dynamics Committee for the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, ASCE. He is a member of Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe), a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, and a member of the Congress Committee and General Assembly of the International Association of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM). He has been honored with several international prizes and awards including the George W. Housner Structural Control & Monitoring Medal and the J. James R. Croes Medal both from ASCE, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE, the T. K. Hsieh Award from the Institution of Civil Engineers, U.K., the Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), USA, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, USA. 

During the years 2003-2009, Professor Makris served as the Director of Reconstruction of the Temple of Zeus in Ancient Nemea, Greece:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxPSeWS52Q

Robust CAV Coordinated In-Vehicle Routing

Robust CAV Coordinated In-Vehicle Routing Leveraging Game Theories, Machine Learning, and Distributed Optimization

A Warren Distinguished Lecture with Lili Du, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida 

Wireless communication, onboard computation facilities, and advanced sensor techniques  have enabled a well-connected and data-rich transportation system, i.e., connected vehicle system (CVS). Even though the CVS has been granted a great potential to smartly route travelers (or CVs) to avoid traffic congestion, scholars have recognized that as the majority of vehicles become CVs, current real-time information provision and routing methods may worsen traffic congestion, given each CV selfishly and independently chooses its own shortest path. This inherent deficiency of the current routing methods is rooted in the inconsistency between system performance and individual vehicles' route choice behavior. By viewing this, our studies have introduced a novel Coordinated In-Vehicle Routing Mechanism (CRM), which used various game theories to coordinate CVs' routing decisions to address the overreaction phenomenon and the inability to control system performance.