Riccardo Cappa and Research Team Win ASCE Geotechnical Engineering Paper Award
The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently awarded Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) Senior Consulting Engineer Riccardo Cappa and his research team with the 2022 Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award at the organization’s Geo-Congress event in Los Angeles on 28 March 2023. The award recognizes outstanding papers for their contribution to the field of geotechnical engineering.
The paper, “Settlement Rate Increase in Organic Soils Following Cyclic Loading,” was published in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering in February 2021 and co-authored by a research team of Riccardo, Anne Lemnitzer (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; University of California, Irvine), Samuel Yniesta (Department of Civil, Geological, and Mining Engineering; Polytechnique Montréal), and Scott Brandenberg (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; University of California, Los Angeles). The paper rethinks the traditional consolidation settlement analysis of soft soils and was partly based on test results from Ph.D. research conducted by Riccardo at the University of California, Davis, geotechnical centrifuge facility.
Riccardo and Scott accepted the award at the event from ASCE Geo-Institute president Sissy Nikolaou, Earthquake Engineering Group Leader for the Materials and Structural Systems Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).