GOLDEN, Colo., Jan. 22, 2015 – Colorado School of Mines Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor D. Vaughan Griffiths serves as the sole non-Australian partner-investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Geotechnical Science and Engineering based at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

The CGSE was created following a seven-year award of $14.4M (AUD) from the Australian Research Council and is collaboration between the University of Western Australia, the University of Newcastle and the University of Wollongong in New South Wales. Mines is the only non-Australian partner institution and Griffiths was invited to be the only non-Australian partner.

The center is charged with providing a national focus for geotechnical research on energy and transport infrastructure and to optimize design of critical geotechnical systems to make them safer and more cost efficient. It will also work with onshore and offshore geotechnical industries to implement new technologies and design practices while also educating and training the next generation of geotechnical engineers and researchers.

The CGSE, created in 2011, has four geotechnical engineering research themes:  1) Georisk, 2) Geomaterial Science, 3) Multiphysics Modelling and 4) Moving Boundary Problems. Professor Griffiths is a leader of the Georisk group and was a key contributor to the ARC proposal on this theme.

Griffiths joined the Mines faculty in 1994. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on geotechnical engineering topics in addition to numerical methods, finite elements and risk assessment. His research has focused on finite element analysis in geotechnical engineering, risk assessment in geotechnical engineering and petroleum geomechanics. He is the author of more than 280 papers and three textbooks that have gone into multiple editions.

Contact:
Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines | 303-273-3541 | kgilbert@mines.edu
Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator, Colorado School of Mines | 303-273-3088 | kmorton@mines.edu