Focus Area: Geotechnical Engineering

Geotechnical Engineering is concerned with the engineering properties of soils and rocks and is one of the most important branches of Civil Engineering. Almost all constructed projects require essential input from geotechnical engineers, e.g. dams, levees, buildings, bridges, foundations, earth retaining structures and slopes. In addition, mitigation of the impact of natural hazards such as earthquakes and landslides require geotechnical engineers to have an in-depth understanding of how soils respond to dynamic loads and groundwater conditions.

View of the large-scale rockslide on the eastern face of the 800-m high Mt. Cabac, Leyte Island, Philippines.

Faculty within the geotechnical engineering research group at the Colorado School of Mines offer Masters and Doctoral thesis research topics with considerable breadth and depth that includes advanced laboratory testing and field instrumentation, soil-structure interaction and dynamic analysis, fundamental constitutive modeling and numerical and probabilistic modeling using high performance computers.

Geotechnical Engineering Faculty
D. V. Griffiths
M. S. Gutierrez
N. Lu
M. A. Mooney
J. Wang
R. Zhang