Building and Evaluating Education and Outreach Programs for an NSF Engineering Research Center, the Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (CBBG)

Through 3.8 billion years of trial and error (sometimes referred to as evolution), nature has developed many elegant, efficient, and sustainable biologically based solutions to some of the challenges that vex geotechnical infrastructure systems today. Examples include ant excavation processes that are 1,000 times more energy efficient than man-made tunneling machines, carbonate-cemented sand that is exceptionally resistant to erosion and earthquakes, and self-sensing and selfhealing tree root structures that are 10 times more efficient than any mechanical soil reinforcing system developed by humans.