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Texas A&M Engineering's Biscontin receives prestigious NSF CAREER award
Texas A&M assistant professor Giovanna Biscontin receives prestigious NSF CAREER award
COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Dr. Giovanna Biscontin, assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received a 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for her research on characterization and modeling of marine clays for slope stability.
The $400,000 grant will continue through 2010.
The prestigious NSF CAREER awards go to new faculty members for their career-development and teaching activities, highlighting them as upcoming academic leaders in the 21st century.
"This award recognizes Dr. Biscontin's tremendous potential as a civil engineering faculty member and places her among a very select group of young investigators," said Dr. David Rosowsky, head of the Department of Civil Engineering and holder of the A.P. and Florence Wiley Chair in Civil Engineering. "This grant will provide significant funding for her work in the area of modeling of marine clays and will allow her to further develop her research group at Texas A&M. Dr. Biscontin is a shining example of the outstanding faculty we are fortunate to have in the Department of Civil Engineering."
Biscontin's research focuses on characterizing the response of submarine, or underwater, soils to dynamic loading, such as earthquakes. When submarine slopes fail, the shift of the large landslide mass can cause a tsunami in addition to the direct damage they inflict. Biscontin is developing a mathematical model of the soft soils response, based on measured properties. This allows her to perform a seismic site response analysis, which predicts the performance of a soil profile subjected to different earthquakes. This tool can be used to analyze how the amplitude and frequency of a given earthquake can affect different soils and slope configurations. The grant will also help Biscontin to develop visualization software based on the seismic analysis tool, as well as help researchers around the world to understand different mechanisms leading to tsunamis.
Biscontin will use some of the funding to integrate high school science teachers into her research. Together, they will work on developing new teaching aids bringing new perspectives to the traditional curriculum and generating more interest in the science and engineering disciplines. Biscontin will also collaborate with the Museum of Science and History in Fort Worth on an exhibition on earthquake hazards.
"I'm very excited about winning this very prestigious award. It is a huge satisfaction and a very special one because it is so hard to get one of these grants. It is a huge confirmation to know you are doing something right, and it sustains the research," Biscontin said.
Biscontin joined the civil engineering department in 2002. She received her Laurea from the University of Padova in Italy in civil engineering, and a master's degree and doctorate in geotechnical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
For more information, contact
Source: Dr. Giovanna Biscontin
(979) 845-6303
gbiscontin@civil.tamu.edu
Reporter: Bonnie L. Shortner
teeswriter1@tamu.edu
News Story 1147,
Direct page link:
http://tees.tamu.edu/news/1147
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