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Professor and student in a School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment lab.

Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics

Arizona State University will lead a new National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center to pioneer advances in geotechnical engineering that promise solutions to some of the world’s biggest environmental and infrastructure development challenges.

The consortium of university, industry and government partners has been awarded $18.5 million to establish the Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (CBBG) to expand the emerging field of biogeotechnical engineering.

The goal: to develop geotechnical engineering processes and solutions inspired by nature to transform the design and construction of resilient and sustainable subsurface systems and infrastructure in the USA and worldwide. Research and development will be informed by industry input to develop sustainable and cost-effective geotechnical processes and products that can be readily commercialized and deployed into civil infrastructure systems.

ASU is now one of only two universities in the country leading two NSF-funded Engineering Research Centers. The other, founded in 2011, is the Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies Center (QESST), a research unit of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. In addition ASU is a partner in a third NSF-funded Engineering Research Center, the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Systems (NEWT).

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