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Mason Ghafghazi

Associate Professor

Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering

  • Associate Professor
    Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering
  • 416 978-5972 (Work)

BIO

My research focuses on addressing the practical issues that industry faces when dealing with soils, or soil-like materials that do not have the typical characteristics of clean quartz sands, or plastic clays. I use advanced laboratory element testing, large scale testing, and constitutive and numerical modelling to address these problems.

My research group works on quantifying the response of non-classic geomaterials such as widely graded gravelly soils, tailings and silts. The work starts by characterizing the fundamental behaviour of different materials through element testing in our lab and continues by developing constitutive models, analyzing the problems and validating them through large scale tests. The results are being utilized to analyze field characterization tools such as the Cone Penetrometer, to demonstrate how the interpretation of these tests would be affected by different soil properties. Once the in-situ soil conditions are known, full scale problems, including documented case histories of performance under extreme events are analyzed to investigate the influence of material-specific behaviour on system performance.

Media availability: TV, Radio

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • Assistant Professor
    University of Toronto, Toronto, CanadaSep 2015 - present
  • Project Scientist
    University of California, Davis, Davis, United StatesOct 2014 - Aug 2015
  • Post-doctoral Fellow
    University of California, Davis, Davis, United States2012 - Sep 2014
  • Research Assistant
    University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CanadaSep 2004 - Sep 2007

NON-ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • Geotechnical Engineer
    BC Hydro (Canada), Vancouver, CanadaMay 2008 - Jan 2012
  • Researcher
    Golder Associates (Canada), Toronto, CanadaSep 2007 - Feb 2008

DEGREES

  • PhD. - Geotechnical Engineering
    University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
  • MSc. - Geotechnical Engineering
    Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran
  • BSc. - Civil Engineering
    Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

AVAILABILITY

  • Industry Projects
  • Masters Research or PhD student supervision
  • Media enquiries

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