The Liquefaction Experiments and Analysis Projects (LEAP) led by Dr. Majid Manzari, Department Chair and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have received worldwide attention as the premier research program on validation of geotechnical analysis. His work in this area made him a stand-out choice to deliver a keynote lecture at the International Conference on Seismic and Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering where he discussed some of LEAP’s major achievements.
LEAP is an international research collaboration among three universities in the U.S. and eight universities and research centers in the United Kingdom, France, Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. In the past six years, over 80 centrifuge experiments and 120 element tests were conducted to investigate the seismic response of critical civil infrastructure systems in the presence of soil liquefaction. The latest LEAP workshop was LEAP-GWU-2022 which focused on the seismic response of water-front structures in liquefiable soils.