Fox receives recognition for paper published in Geosynthetics International

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A research paper written by Patrick Fox, the John A. and Harriette K. Shaw Professor and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State, has been honored with the 2018 Editor’s Choice Award by Geosynthetics International, an official journal of the International Geosynthetics Society (IGS).

Fox, along with Yewei Zheng, assistant professor of civil engineering at Old Dominion University, John McCartney, chair and professor of structural engineering at the University of California at San Diego, and P. Benson Shing, professor of structural engineering at the University of California at San Diego, received the honor for their paper titled, “Transverse shaking table test of a half-scale geosynthetic-reinforced soil bridge abutment,” which was published in the December 2018 issue of the journal. Theirs is one of three papers to receive this distinction for 2018.

Geosynthetic-reinforced soil (GRS) bridge abutments are commonly used in bridge design and provide many advantages over traditional pile-supported designs. These advantages include lower cost, faster construction time, and a smoother transition between the bridge and roadway. However, the design hasn’t been used in high seismicity regions due to questions regarding the safety of these structures during earthquakes. The recognized paper presented a unique experimental study on the response of a half-scale-sized GRS bridge abutment subjected to earthquake-like shaking in the transverse direction (i.e., perpendicular to the direction of the bridge), which has never been investigated previously.

Fox joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State in 2015. His research interests include slope stability, retaining walls, groundwater, consolidation, geosynthetics, landfills, foundation engineering, soil dynamics and earthquake engineering.

Fox has been a member of the IGS since 1998, received the IGS Award for research in 2008 and 2018, and is a member of the editorial boards of both IGS journals – Geosynthetics International and Geotextiles and Geomembranes.

Geosynthetics International is an official journal of the IGS and serves the mandate of the society to disseminate important technical developments to its members.