2026 Spring Short Course

The ASCE Seattle Section Geotechnical Group / Seattle Geo-Institute Chapter is proud to an­nounce our annual Short Course, which will be held on May 1st, 2026. The Short Course will be held on the 76th floor of the Columbia Tower. Course attendees will be eligible to receive 0.7 Continuing Education Units (CEU) or 7 Professional Development Hours (PDH).

Topic 1: Advanced Tools for Site Response Analysis

Site response analysis is one of the most commonly performed types of analysis in geotechnical earthquake engineering. New approaches have been developed for site response analysis that can (1) enhance the efficiency of the analysis (i.e., random vibration theory, RVT), (2) incorporate uncertainties in the input properties (i.e., statistical variation of properties), and (3) improve site response predictions at larger strains (i.e., frequency-dependent properties, kappa scaling). These advancements have been incorporated into the publicly available and open-source site response programs Strata and pyStrata. Strata is a stand-alone program that includes an easy-to-use graphical user interface for both providing input data and analyzing output results. pyStrata is a Python package that implements many of the features included in Strata, plus a few more, and allows for developing custom workflows. In this short course, we will describe the recent advancements listed above, explain their incorporation into Strata and pyStrata, and provide live demonstrations.

Topic 2: Next Generation Liquefaction Models for Susceptibility, Triggering, and Manifestation

In this half-day seminar, members of one of the Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) model development teams, known as the SMT, will highlight the main outcomes of a project jointly supported by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) to use the extensive NGL project’s case history database to develop a suite of models for the probabilities of liquefaction susceptibility, triggering, and ground surface manifestation. The NGL models represent a significant evolution in liquefaction modeling; this workshop will facilitate understanding of how they are different and provide practical, detailed guidance on how they can be applied.