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Geotechnical News • September 2012
GEO-INSTITUTE NEWS
Civil Engineering at the National
Technical University of Athens, GA
(NTUA). His research spans several
areas of geotechnical earthquake engi-
neering with emphasis on soil–struc-
ture interaction. Combining numerical
analysis with physical modeling, he
has published 45 journal papers and
more than 100 book and conference
proceedings. Additionally, he is the
driving force behind the development
of a new Experimental Facility for
Simulation of Soil-Structure Systems
at NTUA. He has participated in
several european research projects,
and served as a consultant in a variety
of engineering projects in Greece,
the U.S., U.A.E., and Qatar. He was
recently selected by the ISSMGE as
the inaugural recipient of the Young
Researcher Award in Geotechnical
Earthquake Engineering.
Dominic Assimaki, A.M.ASCE
,
associate professor, School of Civil
and Environmental Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology since
2005. Her teaching and research inter-
ests focus on numerical simulation
of dynamic nonlinear soil response,
soil-structure interaction, and inverse
problems in near-surface geophysics.
She has a BS in civil engineering from
the National Technical University of
Athens (Athens, Greece), and a MS
and a ScD from the Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineer-
ing at MIT (Cambridge, MA). She
has been a research fellow of the
European Research Training Network
Seismic Assessment for Earthquake
Risk Reduction (SAFERR) in Paris,
France, and a post-doctoral researcher
at the Institute for Crustal Studies at
the University of California, Santa
Barbara. Assimaki has authored and
co-authored more than 100 publica-
tions in books, peer-reviewed journals,
and conference proceedings. She is
the recipient of the 2008 Bill Schutz
Junior Faculty Teaching Award for
Excellence, the 2012 Excellence in
Research Award from the Georgia
Institute of Technology, and the 2009
Arthur Casagrande Professional
Development Award from the Geo-
Institute.
First monolith for locks on
Pacific side of Panama Canal
completed
Construction of the first of 46 mono-
liths for the new locks on the Pacific
end of the Panama Canal has been
completed. The concrete and steel
structure has a height of 111 feet,
width of 24.6 feet and depth of 88.6
feet and is in the upper chamber. It
took 232 tons of reinforced steel and
91,995 cubic feet of concrete to build
it. The new locks are expected to be
finished in 2014 and scheduled to open
for traffic in 2015.
The new locks on the Pacific side of
the canal will enable ships with more
than double the container capacity of
the current Panamax-sized ships to
transit one set of locks, instead of the
two existing locks, from the sea level
of the Pacific Ocean up to the level of
Lake Gatun and then through another
set of new locks down to the level of
the Caribbean Sea.
United States Society on Dams
2013 Annual Meeting and
Conference
February 11 - 15, 2013
Phoenix, AZ
This USSD conference theme is
“Changing Times — The Chal-
lenges and Risks of Managing Aging
Infrastructure under a New Financial
Reality”. The responsibility to create
sustainable projects that are sensitive
to environmental, social, financial,
geographical and political needs of the
world’s population is ever increasing.
At the same time, the average age of
the nation’s existing dam infrastruc-
ture is rising, and in the next five years
nearly 60,000 of the more than 80,000
dams in our national inventory will
have exceeded their design life. In
addition, many older dams that were
constructed to protect agricultural
interests are now protecting people
and personal property, and many of
these structures’ classifications have
changed to high hazard, bringing
new costly challenges for owners to
retrofit or modify the existing dams
in response to the new role of the
structure.
A Tuesday morning plenary session
featuring invited speakers discussing
timely dams and water resource issues
will begin the Conference Technical
Program, followed by oral presenta-
tions during concurrent technical
sessions, as well as a poster session on
Tuesday evening. Three Workshops
organized by USSD Technical Com-
mittees on Monitoring and Instrumen-
tation; Construction Cost Estimating;
and Risk Assessment will be held on
Thursday, addressing timely top-
ics of interest to the dams and water
resources community.
Dominic Assimaki
