Areas of Emphasis

Extensive state-of-the-art research and teaching facilities provide access to the latest developments in the field. The strength and breadth of the program is further enhanced by close ties with faculty in other areas of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Soil Science and Mechanical Engineering. Close interaction of the faculty with consulting companies and practitioners also provides opportunity for exposure to the state-of-the-art practice through invited lectures and site visits to ongoing engineering projects in the San Francisco Bay Area.

UC Berkeley's GeoEngineering program offers graduate studies in the following four related areas of emphasis:

Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering

• Soil Mechanics
• Earthquake Engineering
• Foundation Engineering
• Coastal & Offshore Geotechnics
• Repository Design and Site Remediation

  The program in Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering provides a broad, integrated, state of the art course of studies in order to prepare students for leadership roles in practice and research. From its beginnings in the early 1950's the program has grown significantly in its breadth. Today, in addition to traditional strengths in geotechnical earthquake engineering, numerical methods, constitutive modeling, and soil behavior, the program benefits from its close integration with Engineering Geology, Applied Geophysics, Petroleum Engineering, and Seismology. Equipment and facilities include an extensive array of state-of-the-art testing systems. These include triaxial equipment in sizes up to 90 cm diameter; one and two-directional cyclic simple shear and torsional shear equipment; advanced triaxial and consolidation testing systems optimized for a variety of static and dynamic property evaluations; a scale model testing laboratory equipped for both static and dynamic testing model studies; and specialized equipment for coupled flow experiments.

Engineering Geology and Rock Mechanics

• Hydrogeology
• Engineering Geology
• Rock Mechanics

The Engineering Geology and Rock Mechanics program focuses on the application of geologic and engineering principles to the solution of various types of geotechnical, mining, and petroleum engineering problems. This program traces its beginnings to the 1930's when the pioneering work of Prof. Parker Trask showed the importance of using sound understanding of geology and the geologic setting in the evaluation of engineering properties of sedimentary deposits in the design of the foundations for the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Since then the program has evolved to its current breadth. The program is inherently interdisciplinary and draws on the contributions of the entire GeoEngineering faculty and on resources in other departments such as the Earth and Planetary Sciences. The program boasts exceptional laboratory facilities including an ultra-stiff 1 million-pound loading machine, 24 channel quantitative acoustic emission monitoring, and a high-pressure polyaxial steam-driven loading cell. The experimental facility also develops advanced sensors, particularly in the area of MEMS-based wireless autonomous sensor nodes.

Applied Geophysics

• Applied Seismology
• Signal Processing
• Electromagnetic Methods
• Gravimetry

The Applied Geophysics program offers comprehensive courses and broad research opportunities in geophysical methods for mapping subsurface properties of the ground. The program was created originally in 1962, as Engineering Geoscience, to focus teaching and research on the use of geophysical methods for mineral exploration. Over time the objective evolved to encompass the general problem of subsurface imaging and to more diverse applications in geological mapping, petroleum exploration, reservoir characterization, groundwater, environmental remediation, geotechnics, archaeology and ordnance detection. In response to this expanded mission the faculty moved the program to GeoEngineering in 2000. The courses provide quantitative understanding of the fundamental physics and mathematics of the seismic, electrical, electromagnetic, magnetic and gravity methods and of the instrumentation, data processing and interpretation needed for field surveys. Research is currently conducted on the geophysical methods themselves, numerical modeling and interpretation and on applications in a variety of geological / engineering fields.

Petroleum Engineering

• Reservoir Engineering
• Drilling
  
• Applied Geophysics
• Rock Mechanics

  The Petroleum Engineering Undergraduate and Graduate Program at UC Berkeley serves global oil & gas and related industries through fundamental education and research focused on reservoir description, access and management. We succeed through diverse teaching and research that take advantage of the strengths of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the College of Engineering and other related programs at Cal, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. We train our students for the leadership roles in the modern oil, gas and subsurface engineering industries. Many have attended our courses to master fundamentals of multiphase flow, mathematical and numerical methods in earth sciences, and reservoir access and imaging. These students now work for environmental engineering and consulting companies, as well as national laboratories and government agencies.