Jason T. DeJong, Ph.D., F.ASCE, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
DeJong took his current position after first working at the Centre for Offshore Foundation Systems at the University of Western Australia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He directs and coordinates research through the Soil Interactions Laboratory, UC Davis Center for Geotechnical Modeling, and NSF ERC Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics. Results from his research program have been disseminated through more than 200 publications. DeJong is also actively engaged with industry in implementing research advancements in practice.
His major technical achievements have been in the areas of biogeotechnics and soil and site characterization, and he is having a growing impact in geotechnical sustainability. He is one of the pioneers of biogeotechnics, a rapidly emerging field that explores the confluence of biology and geotechnical engineering. DeJong has led the advancement of this field through work on biocementation (microbially induced calcite precipitation) for soil solidification, biofilm formation for permeability reduction in sands, tree-root bio-inspired foundation and anchorage systems, and bio-inspired self-penetrating probes. His ongoing work ranges from fundamental science to industry collaborations for field prototyping.
In the area of soil and site characterization, DeJong has developed new tools and methods that are being used by both researchers and practitioners today; he also serves as a technical reviewer/advisor for companies and on geotechnical projects. Specifically, he developed or refined several in situ (e.g., iBPT, CPT, full-flow penetrometers) and laboratory tools, as well as data quality and correction methods, to improve the characterization of difficult soils – soft sediments, intermediate soils / tailings, and gravelly soils. At the project scale he created an integrated site characterization framework for practice to develop a hypothesis-driven program which streamlines and optimizes industry work, with the goal of cost-efficient and optimized designs that are not excessively conservative and overdesigned.
DeJong’s more recent work in sustainability has focused on developing a framework that can provide quantitative evaluation of the environmental, cost and societal impacts of both existing industry technologies (e.g., ground improvement methods, foundation solutions) and emerging technologies being advanced toward practice (e.g., biogeotechnics). The application of this method has produced impact indexes of site characterization methods, ground improvement methods used for liquefaction mitigation, and deep foundation systems.
His contributions have been recognized through ASCE’s Huber Research Prize and Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award, the ASTM International Hogentogler Award (twice), ICE’s TK Hsieh Prize and Telford Premium Prize, and the Prakash Research Award.
He received a B.S.C.E. from UC Davis and an M.S.C.E. and Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
