The fellowship provides three years of support to those who have demonstrated potential for significant achievements in engineering research.

Professor Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos is Hubler’s adviser. “His research plan is very innovative in the proposed approach to better understand soil deformation during and after soil liquefaction and can have a large impact on the earthquake engineering community,” Athanasopoulos-Zekkos says of Hubler’s research.

Hubler says the goal of his research project is to conduct an integrated research initiative focused on a new direction for assessing post-liquefaction ground deformation by combining large-scale Cyclic Simple Shear (CSS) laboratory experiments, CT-scanning tomography, and high-end 3D Discrete Element Method (DEM) numerical modeling using parallel computing. His proposed plan will provide for the first time a unified approach for soil liquefaction-induced deformations by investigating the micromechanical dynamic response and liquefaction of granular soils and developing a framework for scaling this response to the macro-scale.