Professor John S. McCartney is Chair of the Department of Structural Engineering at the University of California San Diego, specializing in Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. His research interests include unsaturated soil mechanics, geosynthetics engineering, and energy geotechnics. He has received several research awards, including the Walter L. Huber Research Prize from ASCE in 2016, the Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award from ASCE in 2013, the J. James R. Croes medal from ASCE in 2012, the DFI Young Professor Award in 2012, the NSF Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award in 2011, and the IGS Award and Young IGS Award from the International Geosynthetics Society in 2018 and 2008, respectively. His teaching efforts were recognized by the 2012 Shamsher Prakash Prize for Excellence in Teaching of Geotechnical Engineering and the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Advisor from ASCE Region 9. For his service on ASTM Committee D18 on Soil and Rock, he has received the President’s Leadership Award in 2013 and the Richard S. Ladd D18 Standards Development Award in 2011. He is currently the President of the North American Chapter of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS-NA). He is an editor of ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering (JGGE) and Computers and Geotechnics, an associate editor of Canadian Geotechnical Journal and is active on the editorial boards of ASTM Geotechnical Testing Journal (GTJ), Geosynthetics International, Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment, and the Taiwanese Journal of GeoEngineering. He received BS and MS degrees in civil engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2002 and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.
The geotechnical engineering group at UCSD has a vibrant research portfolio with active projects in the areas of geotechnical earthquake engineering, energy geotechnics, post-wildfire mudflows, soil- structure interaction, and fundamental soil and rock behavior. The research approaches used in the group range from full-scale physical modeling, reduced-scale centrifuge modeling, element-scale testing, micro- scale imaging and particle interaction visualization, to numerical simulations. This presentation will give an overview of the main research projects in geotechnical engineering within the department, and will discuss some of the challenges associated with predicting the response of soils and rocks.