It was an honor to receive 2018 Young Engineer Award for Professional Achievement. ASCE St. Louis Newsletter covered the professional and academic background of me as the award winner. The reference for the following article is the newsletter issue of October 2018. Sincerely, -Siavash Zamiran

The Young Engineer Award recognizes professional contributions of younger members to the Society and to the St. Louis Section and is presented annually to a Member of the St. Louis Section of ASCE who is judged to have attained significant professional achievement, and who is less than 35 years of age. This year’s Professional Recognition Award goes to Dr. Siavash Zamiran.

Dr. Zamiran earned a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering in 2009 from Azad University, followed by a Master’s of Science in Civil-Geotechnical in 2012. He then went on to earn his PhD in Engineering Science – Civil/Geotechnical Engineering from SIU-Carbondale in 2017.

Since 2017, Dr. Zamiran has worked with Marino Engineering Associates, where he performs stability analyses of reinforced slopes and retaining walls, subsidence investigations, and computational structural analysis of high-pressure natural gas and petroleum pipelines affected by ground subsidence. He is also teaching as an adjunct professor at SIU-Edwardsville.

Academically, Dr. Zamiran has worked as a Research Assistant and collaborative researcher at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and Edwardsville and Azad University, with research topics including Seismic investigation of cantilever retaining walls, investigation of deep foundations in swelling weathered rock, subsidence investigation of Illinois coal mines, investigation of the behavior of soil nail walls in seismic and static conditions and liquefaction studying of monopile foundation in wind turbines.

Dr. Zamiran has been active with ASCE including: Key Contacts; committee member with Geo-Institute Rock Mechanics Committee, Deep Foundations Committee, and Geophysical Committee; head of judges at ASCE Mid-Continent Student Conference, Geo Wall Competition, and founder and former president of SIUE Geo-Institute Graduate Student Organization where he was the instructor of 4 free public workshops in geotechnical engineering.
Other highlights include:

• Author and co/author of more than 30 conference and journal articles, one book, and reviewer of more than five journals.
• Notable awards received: International Association of Foundation Drilling Award, GeoConfluence Research Scholarship, and Itasca Education Partnership Award.
• Upon his graduation with a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award

Note published in ASCE St. Louis Newsletter - September 2018:
"​Brandi Jones and Siavash Zamiran had the opportunity to represent our Section and gather with other Younger Members from around the nation at the annual Younger Member Leadership Symposium in August 2018. The Symposium, held at the ASCE Headquarters, provides Younger Members with a great opportunity to network and to grow both personally and professionally. We developed personal visions, dove into project management tactics, and discussed communication styles – all of which encouraged new perspectives on life in and out of the workplace and hone in on further developing our leadership skills. We hope to explore some of the discussion points over the next year with our YMs while focusing on growth of our members. "

“YMLS is a bridge which connects young engineers with common enthusiasm and areas of interest and provides an opportunity for sharing their ideas, knowledge and expertise with each other.” – Siavash

It was a pleasure to be invited by Petroleum Engineering Department of University of North Dakota to present a short course on computational geomechanics. The course was held on April 2018 in Grand Forks, ND. The main objective of this short course is the implementation of numerical modeling and geomechanical simulation in petroleum engineering. The course focuses on practical application of numerical modeling on simulation and prediction of geomechanical problems such as wellbore stability analysis, hydraulic fracturing and injection into a porous media. Several topics including elasticity and plasticity of the rock medium, constitutive models, stress distribution, and permeability considerations will be discussed. Simulation procedure of isotropic and transversely isotropic medium and faults and discontinuities will be presented. Commercial programs for geomechanical modeling will be introduced, and finite difference and finite element methods for numerical modeling will be described. The finite difference program, FLAC developed by Itasca Consulting Group Inc. will be considered for conducting practical simulations. 

Course topics were including:

• Introduction to numerical modeling in geomechanical medium
• Introduction to FLAC
• Example application of wellbore stability analysis
• Example application of hydraulic fracturing and fluid injection into porous medium
• Constitutive models used in geomechanical medium
• Permeability considerations
• Discontinuity and faults modeling in geomechanical medium

https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/24176/4/GIBBINS2016DEV.pdf

It was an honor to be the head of judges for GeoWall competition at ASCE Mid-Continent Student Conference. The ASCE Mid-Continent Student Conference was held in April 2018 and several Midwestern schools joined the conference for GeoWall, Bridge, and Canoe competitions. The GeoWall competition was held among four schools including Southern Illinois University Carbondale, University of Missouri Columbia, Kansas State University, and University of Arkansas. 
Photos from left to right: Megan Hart from UMKC, Pravin Jha from Helitech, Eric Glazier from Gonzalez, Siavash Zamiran , and Lyle Simonton from Subsurface Constructors and president of ASCE St. Louis Section

Read Full Article

The article "Seismic motion response and fragility analyses of cantilever retaining walls with cohesive backfill" has been published in Journal of Soils and Foundations in February 2018. In this article, the seismic motion response of a cantilever retaining wall with cohesive and cohesionless backfill materials was evaluated using fully dynamic analysis based on finite difference method. The dynamic analysis was validated based on experimental test results and then compared to analytical and empirical correlations based on Newmark sliding block method. Seven different earthquake events and the backfills with low to high levels of cohesion were considered. Nonlinear regression analyses were carried out to provide correlations between free-field peak ground acceleration (PGA) and maximum relative displacement of the retaining wall. These results were compared to results from empirical and analytical methods. Furthermore, fragility analyses were conducted to determine the probability of damage to the retaining wall for different free-field PGAs and backfill cohesions. It is demonstrated to what extent a small amount of cohesion in backfill material can influence displacement of the retaining wall and probability of damage in seismic conditions.
For reading the full article please visit here.