Page 27 - LWFC Catalog

SPEAKER BIOS
SPEAKER BIOS

Beena Ajmera, PhD, PE (CA) Dr. Ajmer a is, currently, an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Civil and Environmental ngineering at North Dakota State University (NDSU).
She has co-authored over 100 papers in various areas of geotechnical engineering including
fully softened shear strength and compressibility of soil, soil modification, soil dynamics, and
lightweight cellular concrete. She is has received several prestigious awards for her work
including the 2020 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2020 ASCE Thomas A. Middlebrooks Awards,
the inaugural Oldrich Hungr Award from the International Consortium on Landslides, the
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Dwight D. Eisenhower
Transportation Fellowship twice. Dr. Ajmera has supervised or co-supervised over 45
undergraduate and graduate students on various research projects and provided research experiences to
over 50 community college, high school and visiting international undergraduate students. Prior to joining
NDSU in August 2018, Dr. Ajmera was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). She received her B.Sc. in Civil Engineering, B.A. in
Applied Mathematics and M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from CSUF before obtaining her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering
with focus in Geotechnical Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2015. Dr. Ajmera is a licensed professional
engineer in the State of California.

Iván Alhama, PhD. Iván finished the Bachelor’s and PhD degrees in Geological Sciences.
He is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Technical University of
Cartagena, Cartagena, Spain, where his focus is on ground engineering. His research areas
are in seepage, soil consolidation, EPS Geofoam, and geotechnics.

David Arellano, PhD. Dr.Arellano has been an assistant and associate
professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Memphis since August
2005. Previously, he worked in private practice for nearly 10 years for several geotechnical
engineering consulting firms and was an officer in the Corps of Engineers in the U.S. Army
Reserve for 22 years and retired at the rank of Major. During his 22 years of military reserve
service, he was involved in construction projects in various countries such as American
Samoa, Panama, Jordan, Kenya, and Germany. He was deployed to Kuwait for 1 year
as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2003 to 2004. Dr. Arellano has been involved in
lightweight fill research since 1999. Dr. Arellano’s research focus areas are use of lightweight fill to improve
ground conditions and natural hazard mitigation.
Steven Bartlett, PhD. Dr. Bartlett has 30 years of research, design, and construction. He
has been involved with several projects associated with accelerated construction using
lightweight materials. His specialty areas are geotechnical earthquake engineering,
consolidation settlement, liquefaction evaluations, accelerated construction, soil
stabilization, and geosystem instrumentation. He has worked on projects that include:
nuclear facilities, highways, railways, foundation systems, slope stabilization, earthen
dams, mine tailings, buried pipelines, land reclamation, green roofs, and hazardous and
radioactive waste disposal facilities.

Stan Boyle, PhD, PE, D.GE., M.ASCE. Dr. Boyle has over 35 years of geotechnical design and
construction experience. Early in his career Stan worked on construction sites and assisted
with construction cost estimating for heavy civil engineering construction projects including
earth dams, irrigation canals, pipelines, soil cement, pump stations, deep excavations,
material processing, and highways. Stan has been employed at Shannon & Wilson, Inc.,
Seattle, Washington since the mid-1990s where he has provided design services for a wide
range of water, sewer, highway, transit, railroad, dam, and levee projects. In his practice,
he has employed a Systems Approach to not just develop engineering solutions, but with
an objective of integrating more sustainable solutions. Stan is active in the Seattle Geotechnical Group, is on
the Board of Governors for the ASCE Geo-Institute, and is a former International Geosynthetics Society – North
American Chapter Board member.