I am a Lecturer in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. My research focuses on Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction Effects on Cyclic Failure Potential of Silts and Clays involving Centrifuge Modeling. I also teach the Soils Mechanics Laboratory (CEE 128L) course at UCLA.

  My research interests are geotechnical earthquake engineering and resilient geotechnical practice, centrifuge modeling, soil-foundation-structure interaction, bio-geotechnics and soil treatment, soil constitutive modeling and numerical analysis, laboratory testing of soils, seismic hazard analysis, and deep foundations.

  During my Ph.D. studies at UCLA, I've experimentally investigated the effects of pore-fluid salinity and clay mineralogy on cyclic and monotonic behavior of low-plasticity fine-grained soils by a series of Direct Simple Shear experiments. We concluded that low-plasticity fine-grained clays at the same plasticity (PI = 9) but with varying mineralogy and pore-fluid salinity, exhibit significant differences in cyclic response. Moreover, I conducted studies to experimentally map elastolastic surfaces for sands, where yield surface and plastic potential surfaces of sands were approximated by running triaxial compression experiments on loose sand samples. The mapped surfaces, and the method in general, can be used for developing new and more accurate soil constitutive models.