Geotechnical engineering is the art of determining the engineering properties of earth materials for the purpose of safe and economic design of civil engineering systems that may be built on, in, or of soils and rocks. Examples of geotechnical design include foundations for urban structures such as high-rise residential and commercial buildings as well as infrastructure systems such as bridges, power plants, and offshore structures. A typical geotechnical design may involve shallow foundations, deep foundations, and retaining walls.

Geotechnical engineers also design civil engineering systems built in or of earth materials, including tunnels, embankments, levees, earth dams, and hazardous waste and sanitary landfills.

Another major contribution of geotechnical engineers is the key role they play in the assessment of risk to human life and property due to natural hazards such as landslides, earthquakes, debris flows, and rock falls.

The graduate program in geotechnical engineering at GW provides a variety of courses and research opportunities for graduate students in M.Sc. and D.Sc. programs. The main objective of the program is to train geotechnical engineers with an advanced yet practical knowledge of the behavior of geomaterials and geotechnical systems. The emphasis of the graduate program is to provide the students with a solid background in analytical and computational aspects of soil and rock mechanics while providing the students with a comprehension of the current practice of geotechnical engineering via practical design projects.

The M.Sc. program offers a variety of courses that range from physcio-chemical behavior of soils to design of foundations and geotechnical earthquake engineering.

The geotechnical engineering students have access to state-of-the-art facilities for soil testing as well as a six-degree-of-freedom shake table for research in geotechnical earthquake engineering.

In addition to research activities at the graduate level, the geotechnical engineering program has provided research experience to GW undergraduate students. Example of recent research projects undertaken by civil engineering undergraduates are:

• Seismic response of structures
• Shake table testing of saturated layered soils subjected to strong ground motion,
• Numerical modeling of slope stability using elastoplastic finite element analyses

• Soil mechanics
• Rock mechanics
• Advanced foundation design
• Physico-chemical behavior of soils
• Constitutive modeling of soils
• Geotechnical earthquake engineering
• Mechanics of nonlinear continua
• Advanced finite element analysis
• Dynamics of structural systems
• Probabilistic methods in civil engineering
• Random vibrations
• Advanced numerical methods
• Applied mathematical analysis

The Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area is home to many civil engineering and specialized geotechnical engineering firms that involve in local, national, and international geotechnical projects and provide employment and internship opportunities to GW students and graduates. Example of local firms are:

• Bechtel
• Burgess and Niple, Inc.
• Clark Foundation
  
• Schnabel Engineering Associates, Inc.
• Law Engineering and Environmental, Inc.
• Engineering Consulting Services, Inc.
• The Reinforced Earth Company
• Dewberry & Davis, Inc.

• Development of advanced constitutive models for cohesive and non-cohesive soils
• Formulation and application of higher order continua in the analysis of post-failure response of geomaterials and geostructures
• Micropolar elastoplastic analysis of granular materials and geostructures
• Development of robust and efficient computational techniques for integration of rate equations in elastoplasticity
• Dynamics analysis of saturated and partially saturated soils
• Liquefaction-induced large deformations in geostructures
• Shake table simulation of hydraulic fracturing and liquefaction induced failure in soils
• Mechanics of granular materials at very low effective stress
• Meshfree analysis of geotechnical systems

• Constitutive and Numerical Modeling of Permanent Deformation in Soil Structures, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
• Significance of Dilatancy and Localization on the Behavior of Geostructures, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
• Development and Implementation of a Strain Gradient Plasticity Model for Geomaterials in a Meshfree Environment, sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories.

Professor Majid Manzari is the lead faculty in geotechnical engineering area. He is an internationally recognized scholar in geotechnical earthquake engineering, constitutive modeling of soils, and computational geomechanics.

• Contains testing equipment for conducting all conventional tests on soils and for arbitrary stress path and cyclic traixial testing
• A state-of-the-art six-degree-of-freedom shake table for seismic testing of soils and structures