Sherif L. Abdelaziz /  Geotechnical Engineering

Sherif L. Abdelaziz is joining as an Associate Professor. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Virginia Tech and a B.S. from Cairo University in Egypt. He joins our department after five years as an Assistant Professor at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. He also served as a Geotechnical Engineering at CH2M Hill in Herndon, Virginia. His research interests include thermal and energy geotechnics, energy foundations, soil improvement, multiscale soil behavior from microstructure to large-scale, coupled phenomena in earth materials, and resilient infrastructure. Current, he teaches Earth Pressures and Foundation Structures and Foundation Engineering. In 2018, he won the Young Investigator Program award from the U.S. Department of Defense. 

Landon Marston  /  Environmental and Water Resources

Landon Marston is joining as an Assistant Professor. He comes to Virginia Tech from his position as an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University. Prior to that, he was a Hydrologic and Hydraulic ENgineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He earned a B.S. in civil engineering and an MBA from the University of Kentucky. He also earned an M.Eng. in civil engineering from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research aims to provide new understanding and solutions for sustainable water resources management through data analytics, modeling, and analysis of integrated socio-hydrologic systems. His work draws on approaches and concepts from engineering, hydrology, environmental science, and economics. 

Siddharth Saksena  /  Environmental and Water Resources

Siddharth Saksena is joining as a Research Assistant Professor. He graduated from the Lyles School of Civil Engineering at Purdue University with his doctoral degree in 2019. He also earned a master’s degree from Purdue in 2014 and a B.Tech from the Indian Instutute of Technology in Roorkee, India in 2012. While at Purdue, he was a Marc and Carol Gill Endowed Fellow, a Dorothy Faye Dunn Fellow, and received the Nellie Munson Teaching Assistant Award. His research interests include working to develop tools for building flood resilient communities in response to land use and climate change involving watershed-scale flood modeling and forecasting using an integrated hydro-systems analysis. He has eight publications and has taught a wide variety of courses in hydrology and water resources.