Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the University of California at Davis (UCD).  His areas of teaching, research and practice are: geotechnical earthquake engineering; soil mechanics and foundation engineering; earthfill and rockfill dam engineering; and numerical modeling.  He joined the faculty at UCD in 1989 following 20 years at Woodward-Clyde Consultants in San Francisco, Santa Ana and Oakland where he was a senior Principal, and five years as a member of the teaching and research staff of the geotechnical engineering group at the University of California at Berkeley.

He retired from the faculty position at UCD in July 2004.

He completed his Ph. D. degree in 1966 at the University of California at Berkeley.  Prior to that he had completed an MS degree at Caltech in 1959 and a BCE degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1958.

He has been involved in post earthquake investigations since the occurrence of the 1964 Great Alaska earthquake and has done comprehensive post earthquake investigations of some ten earthquakes from Anchorage to Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan.  He has developed or co-developed many of the currently used procedures for evaluating the behavior of soil sites and soil structures during earthquakes.  He has provided and continues to provide consulting services on many projects in the USA and other countries.  He has served and continues to serve on several consulting or review boards for US and International companies and for State and US Federal Agencies.

He has received many awards and honors over the past thirty-five years, including election to the US National Academy of Engineering in 1989, receipt of the first H. Bolton Seed Medal from ASCE in 1995, the distinguished scholarly public service award from the University of California at Davis in 1999, and was elected an honorary member of the Japanese Geotechnical Society in 2005.