Fox receives Geosynthetics International's best paper award

10/25/2016

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa — Patrick Fox, Shaw Professor and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State, has been named the 2015 recipient of the Best Paper Award for the journal Geosynthetics International.

Fox, along with Timothy Stark, professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received the honor for their paper titled, “State-of-the-art report: GCL shear strength and its measurement – ten-year update,” which was published in the February 2015 edition of the journal.

The paper presented an update to their 2004 paper and provides an expansive source of information on the shear strength and shear strength testing of geosynthetic clay liners (GCLs). Essential concepts of shear stress–displacement behavior and shear strength are examined as well as detailed discussions on the laboratory measurement of the shear strength of GCLs and GCL interfaces. GCLs are widely used as hydraulic barrier materials in the construction of landfills and other waste containment facilities.

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.

Prior to joining Penn State, Fox was a professor of geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering in the Department of Structural Engineering at the University of California-San Diego where he co-authored the winning paper. He received a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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

Fox will each receive a certificate recognizing his achievement.

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