Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering

Meeting

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering: Meeting on Geotechnical Engineering Research Needs for Natural Hazard Mitigation

January 7 - 8, 2026

Upcoming

About

This convening will identify priority research directions in geotechnical engineering that address pressing knowledge gaps related to natural hazard risk management and mitigation. Leveraging the convening capacity of the COGGE and the National Academies, geotechnical engineers and multidisciplinary experts will consider unresolved geotechnical performance issues observed during recent extreme events and explore how fundamental research could address those challenges.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Webinar Series: A Replicable Geohazard Decision Framework Applied to the Spirit Lake/Toutle River Watershed, Mount St. Helens

December 11, 2025

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EST)

Register

Upcoming

About

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington State radically changed the physical and socio-economic landscapes of the region. The eruption destroyed the summit of the volcano, sent large amounts of debris into the North Fork Toutle River, and blocked the sole drainage from nearby Spirit Lake. Failure of that debris blockage resulting from rising lake levels puts the downstream population of over 50,000 at risk of catastrophic flooding and mud flows. This webinar will describe the transparent multi-criteria decision analysis framework used to compare technical alternativities for addressing geohazards in the region and thus move from risk analysis conducted in a sometimes-contentious social environment to durable and defensible decision making.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Webinar: Geotechnically-Guided Architecture with David Frost

November 13, 2025

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EST)

Past

About

Geotechnical engineering is a vital component for the design and management of resilient infrastructure systems. However, infrastructure is often envisioned without much early thought given to the geo materials it is built in, on, or with. In this next webinar presented by the Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering, David Frost of Georgia Tech will introduce ways of thinking about design, construction, and management of infrastructure that makes geotechnical engineering central to more resilient, creative, and better functioning infrastructure.

Contact

Sam Kraft

(202) 334-3371
skraft@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting Closed

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Fall meeting 2025 (Part 2)

October 17, 2025

10:00 AM - 2:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

This meeting is between committee and staff and will be used to start planning for an open-session meeting in January.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting Closed

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Fall Meeting 2025 (Part 1)

October 15, 2025

10:00 AM - 2:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

This meeting is between committee and staff and will be used to start planning for an open-session meeting in January.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Spring Meeting - Developing Consistent Geohazard Parameters for Infrastructure System Design Against Extreme Events

May 8 - 9, 2025

Past

About

Lifeline Infrastructure consists of large and broadly distributed systems spread over many types of terrain and geologic settings and exposed to many different geohazards (e.g., earthquake, flood, and weather events). Because infrastructure systems provide essential services to communities, their resilience in the face of extreme events is vital. Confidence in system performance following extreme events depends on: (1) defining performance criteria and objectives; (2) defining geohazard parameters consistent with those objectives; and (3) developing design criteria that address geohazard parameters with acceptable levels of risk. Because there is no consistent framework for defining geohazard parameters, it is likely that the same parameters may be inappropriately applied to different risks across a system or that inconsistent design parameters may be applied across a system. This could result in misrepresentation of performance expectations. This meeting of the Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) will consider how methods to identify geohazard design parameters (e.g., deterministic and probabilistic) may or may not be contributing to the confidence in infrastructure performance at the component and system level in the face of extreme events.

Please use this link to attend starting at 1:00PM EST: https://nasem.zoom.us/j/93057186413

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Location

Keck Center

500 5th St NW

Washington DC 20001, USA

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting Closed

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Committee Meeting

March 19, 2025

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (EDT)

Past

About

This was the first committee meeting with the new members who've joined the Committee on Geological an Geotechnical Engineering.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Strategies for Resilient Lifeline Infrastructure – A Critical Part of Community Recovery from Extreme Natural Hazards

October 24, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

Lifeline infrastructure systems are an integral backbone of today’s communities, providing important services such as water delivery and wastewater management, electricity and communications, and transportation. These systems are also exposed to multiple natural hazards, and many of their assets have critical components that are founded or buried below the ground surface. A thorough understanding of the subsurface and the life cycle condition of these assets is needed to evaluate the risks imposed on them by extreme geohazards, often combined with extreme weather effects. Earthquakes, floods, rainfalls, wildfires, and associated hazards such as fault rupture, liquefaction, landslides, scour, and alterations of topography and soils properties are some examples of geohazards that lifelines can be exposed to. Addressing the risk requires assessments on a component, asset, system, and system-of-system scales that likely involves localized or regional decisions. This webinar discussion will inform geoprofessionals about the available strategies for resilient lifeline infrastructure design and the need for continued innovation. The role of mitigation solutions in enhancing lifeline resilience through a holistic, better-than-code thinking and more realistic performance goals will also be discussed

Contact

skraft

(202) 334-3371
skraft@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting

Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering Fall Meeting 2024 - Engineering Across Faults

October 16 - 17, 2024

Past

Agenda

Download the Agenda

About

The Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will host an open meeting on October 16, 2024. The purpose of the meeting is to consider how critical infrastructure is designed and constructed across active faults and identify in what areas those practices are in need of improvement. This topic is motivated by surface faulting from the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake and the development of future linear infrastructure in active faulting regions such as the high-speed rail in California.

This meeting will consider a broad range of topical questions that include:

How are fault displacement hazards identified and characterized at the site level—what do we do well and where are the uncertainties?
How do potential fault ruptures and displacements influence how corridors are selected? What are the scientific, engineering, environmental, and ethical considerations that inform this decision making when considering fault rupture and displacements?
How certain are we of engineering solutions in use or are being proposed to prevent or mitigate damage from fault displacements?
How are post-event response, including considerations for resilience and recovery, typically incorporated into engineering design and where are there gaps in practice?

Contact

Samuel Kraft

(202) 334-3371
skraft@nas.edu

Location

National Academy of Sciences Building

2101 Constitution Ave NW

Washington DC 20418, USA

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Numerical modeling of large deformation problems in Geotechnical Engineering

June 20, 2024

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

Catastrophic infrastructure failure often stems from the dynamic interaction of soil and water, typically resulting in liquefaction and lateral spreading. Modeling behavior beyond the point of failure needs to account for the complex interactions between solid and liquid phases, the transition from solid behavior to sediment transport, and the issues associated with large deformations. The Material Point Method (MPM) stands out as particularly effective for numerical modeling of large deformations, but is limited in terms of resolution and scale due to computational costs. In this context, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based MPM implementations can accelerate MPM programs by up to 100 times. Current hardware trends indicate that GPUs will become increasingly viable, with expected advancements in video memory, bandwidth, computational cores, and accessibility over the next four years. This presentation reviews these aspects, highlights trends, opportunities, and challenges, and explores the prospects for liquefaction simulation.

Contact

Maya Frey

(202) 334-3474
mfrey@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting

Geotechnical Data Management for Enhanced Accessibility and Reusability

November 2 - 3, 2023

Past

Materials

COGGE Fall 2023 Meeting Briefing Materials

About

Increasingly, technical decisions in many fields will rely on the capacity of computational systems to locate and analyze appropriate data. To optimize data use, data will need to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Public funds for data collection and research are provided increasingly with the caveat that resulting data are made available publicly. Various disciplines are embracing FAIR data principles when collecting and storing data to optimize their future use. This meeting of the Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) will explore the principles of FAIR data, how state-of-the-art data management looks like in other fields, and how FAIR data management could benefit the geo-professional community. The goal of this meeting is to determine how COGGE and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine can serve the broader geo-professional community to further practices in data management.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Location

Keck Center

500 5th St NW

Washington DC 20001, USA

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

The Post-Disaster Context: Considerations for Engineers

October 26, 2023

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

The last decades have yielded significant research regarding sustainable and resilient engineering design and urban planning. Yet destructive disasters happen, and engineers and planners responding to and rebuilding after disasters can find themselves in dynamic, time-compressed decision-making situations and underappreciating the social, economic, and governance factors that also need to be considered. During this next installment of the COGGE Webinar Series, Laurie Johnson (Laurie Johnson Consulting | Research) and Robert Olshansky (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, emeritus) will share from their 30 years of collaboration about what it is like to work in a post-disaster environment, considerations for rebuilding in disaster-prone regions, and the structures that need to be in place that allow for rapid and simultaneous engineering evaluation and responses that best serve disaster-impacted communities.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Game-Changing Augmented Reality Applications for the Geo-Professional

September 7, 2023

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

Augmented-reality technologies are increasingly accessible. The geo-professional, decision maker, and student are able to visit and walk around field sites virtually, and view them from above, below, or even within. Data and models (e.g., subsurface, hydrologic, geophysical), and location of future infrastructure can be incorporated into the 3-dimensional virtualization. This webinar, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) will explore augmented reality applications that may soon change the professional and educational environments.

Contact

Sammantha Magsino

(202) 334-3091
smagsino@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Meeting

Spring 2023 Meeting / Workshop on Corrosion of Buried Steel at New and In-Service Infrastructure: Implementing Report Recommendations

May 11 - 12, 2023

Past

Agenda

Download the Agenda

About

The recent report Corrosion of Buried Steel at New and In-Service Infrastructure explores the state of knowledge and technical issues regarding the corrosion of steel used for earth applications (e.g., for ground stabilization, pipelines, and infrastructure foundations) in unconsolidated earth or rock in different geologic settings. The report summarizes mechanisms of steel corrosion, assesses the state of practice for characterizing factors in the subsurface environment that influence corrosion and corrosion rates, and assesses the efficacy and uncertainties associated with quantitative, field, and laboratory methods for predicting corrosion. This workshop will explore the recommendations in the report including those related to generating new data on corrosion through collaborative long-term experiments, sharing and managing data, developing new data analytical techniques to inform infrastructure design, construction, and management decisions, and developing decision support systems that guide site characterization and help manage risk. Workshop participants will discuss how such recommendations might be implemented.

Contact

Emily Bermudez

(202) 334-3386
ebermudez@nas.edu

Location

National Academy of Sciences Building

2101 Constitution Ave NW

Washington DC 20418, USA

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

Webinar

Managing Your Geotechnical Engineering Career Trajectory and the Trajectory of the Profession

April 27, 2023

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EDT)

Past

About

Decisions made early in a career in geotechnical engineering can shape one’s career trajectory. The Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering (COGGE) will host a panel of geoprofessionals at different stages in their careers to discuss the choices, events, and circumstances which shaped their careers, how they benefited from mentoring, and how mentoring can positively impact the future the geo-related professions. COGGE member Rula Deeb (Geosyntec) will moderate a discussion on these topics with Lizan Gilbert (Kiewit), Allen Marr (Geocomp), Priscilla Nelson (Colorado School of Mines), and Sissy Nikolaou (NIST). Webinar participants will have the opportunity to submit questions to the panel.

Contact

Emily Bermudez

(202) 334-3386
ebermudez@nas.edu

Disclaimer

It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

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Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering