DFI Announces Winner of 2022 Student Paper Competition

Jared Martinez, a master’s degree candidate at Portland State University, is the winner of the DFI Educational Trust Student Paper Competition. His focus is on geotechnical engineering, with research topics including seismic load combinations and liquefaction susceptibility of low plasticity silts. Martinez has more than 5 years of geotechnical consulting experience in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

His paper, “Combined Effects of Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Spreading and Superstructure Inertial Loads on Pile Foundations,” uses experimental data generated from a 1-g shake table test to analyze the timing of the lateral forces experienced by a 10 in (250 mm) diameter reinforced concrete pile embedded in a gently sloped multilayer soil, including a non-liquefiable crust overlying a liquefiable loose sand layer, overlying a dense sand layer.

Martinez is presenting his paper on Wednesday, October 5, at 3:45 p.m. at DFI’s 47th Annual Conference on Deep Foundations being held in National Harbor, Maryland.

Genesis Figueroa Palacios, a graduate student researcher at University of California, Irvine, is receiving a Student Paper Competition special recognition award for her paper, “Load Capacity Prediction of Drilled Displacement Piles with SPT- and CPT-based Direct Methods.”