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The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineeirng welcomed Professor Ning Lu, a faculty member at the Colorado School of Mines, for a seminar on April 9.
Speaking to an enthusiastic audience of UMD faculty and students, Lu detailed a new paradigm for predicting rainfall-induced landslides.
More specifically, Lu highlighted two major advancements in landslide prediction, both stemming from multi-year field hydro-mechanical monitoring. The first is the capability of handling the transient field of effective stress in variably saturated slopes under rainfall conditions. The second entails quantifying the field of the local factor of safety (FS), which radically departs from the classical one-FS-for-one-slope paradigm, thus allowing for identification of failure initiation and progression zones in slopes.
Lu has garnered numerous honors over the course of his career. He recently received the American Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) Karl Terzaghi Award for seminal contributions to the understanding of the fundamental mechanisms governing the behavior of unsaturated soils and their implications for for slope stability and other geotechnical problems. In 2017, he received ASCE's 2017 R. B. Peck Award and M. A. Biot Medal in recognition of his achievement in designing a new paradigm for slope stability under variably saturated conditions.
He is a distinguished member of ASCE and a fellow of the Geological Society of America. His publications include two widely used textbooks: Unsaturated Soil Mechanics (John Wiley and Sons, 2004), and Hillslope Hydrology and Stability (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
May 1, 2025
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