Soil liquefaction occurs when a cohesionless saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress such as shaking during an earthquake or other sudden change in stress condition, in which material that is ordinarily a solid behaves like a liquid. In soil mechanics, the term "liquefied" was first used by Allen Hazen in reference to the 1918 failure of the Calaveras Dam in California. He described the mechanism of flow liquefaction of the embankment dam as:
If the pressure of the water in the pores is great enough to carry all the load, it will have the effect of holding the particles apart and of producing a condition that is practically equivalent to that of quicksand... the initial movement of some part of the material might result in accumulating pressure, first on one point, and then on another, successively, as the early points of concentration were liquefied.
Egor Pavlovich Popov was a structural and seismic engineer who helped transform the design of buildings, structures, and civil engineering around earthquake-prone regions.
Sarada Kanta Sarma is a geotechnical engineer, emeritus reader of engineering seismology and senior research investigator at Imperial College London. He has developed a method of seismic slope stability analysis which is named after him, the Sarma method.
Thomas Denis O’Rourke is an American educator, engineer and serves as the Thomas R. Biggs Professor of civil & environmental engineering at the Cornell University College of Engineering. O’Rourke took his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering at Cornell's engineering college in 1970 and his doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1975.
Harry Bolton Seed was an educator, scholar, former professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was regarded as the founding father of geotechnical earthquake engineering.
Geoprofessions is a term coined by the Geoprofessional Business Association to connote various technical disciplines that involve engineering, earth and environmental services applied to below-ground ("subsurface"), ground-surface, and ground-surface-connected conditions, structures, or formations. The principal disciplines include, as major categories:
Ashraf Habibullah is a Pakistani-American structural engineer and software developer. He earned his M.S. (1970) in Civil (Structural) Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and B.S. (1969) in Civil Engineering from the University of Karachi, Pakistan. He is a licensed Civil Engineering and Structural Engineer in California. After earning his M.S., he worked at McClure and Messinger (1971-1973), and then Earthquake Engineering Systems (1974).
Timothy D. Stark is a Professor of Geotechnical Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign since 1991. Dr. Stark teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Foundation Engineering and Earth Structures, respectively, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the UIUC and numerous short courses for various entities. Stark has served as a consultant and expert on a range of domestic and international projects including levees and dams, buildings, bridges, slopes, geosynthetics, seismic issues, waste containment facilities, and highways.
Harry George Poulos is an Australian of Greek descent civil engineer specialising in geotechnical engineering and soil mechanics, internationally known as an expert on soil behaviour and pile foundations.
Donald Van Norman Roberts was a civil, geotechnical and environmental engineer from the United States, and advocate for sustainability developments in engineering.
Medhat Haroun was an Egyptian-American expert on earthquake engineering. He wrote more than 300 technical papers and received the Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award (2006) and the Walter Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (1992) from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Armen Der Kiureghian, is an Iranian-born Armenian-American academic, one of the founders of the American University of Armenia, where he served as the president from 2014 to 2019.
Andrew Stuart Whittaker is an American structural engineer who is currently a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Reginald DesRoches is an American civil engineer has served as the president of Rice University since July 1, 2022. From 2020 until 2022, he served as provost of Rice. Earlier, beginning in 2017, he was the dean of engineering at Rice's school of engineering, and from 2012 to 2017, DesRoches held the Karen and John Huff Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jack Moehle is the Ed and Diane Wilson Presidential Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Patrick J Fox, Ph.D., P.E., BC.GE, F.ASCE is an American civil engineer and currently the Dean of the Russ College of Engineering and Technology at Ohio University. His field of expertise is geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering, with specializations in slope stability, retaining walls, landfills, and settlement. He obtained a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1992.
Jennifer L. Donahue is an American businesswoman, seismic engineer, and leadership coach. She is the founder and incumbent president of JL Donahue Engineering.
Edward Kavazanjian Jr. is an American civil engineer who specializes in geotechnical engineering. He is the Ira A. Fulton Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the Arizona State University School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environmental.
Steven Lawrence Kramer is Professor Emeritus of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Washington.
Ronald Fraser Scott was a British-born, American geotechnical engineer. An internationally recognized authority on the mechanics of soils, his lunar soil experiments on the Surveyor missions cleared the Apollo astronauts to walk safely on the moon.
