About the Speaker

Melinda Eason is a Geotechnical Engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Philadelphia District, and a registered Professional Engineer in Delaware. She has over 11 years of combined private and public sector experience in geotechnical engineering, including shallow and deep foundation design, site characterization, beach nourishment, and dredging projects. Melinda earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the University of Kentucky and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Villanova University with a focus on geotechnical engineering. In addition to her engineering career, she is a strong advocate for STEM education.

On Tuesday, September 16th, DVGI kicked off the 2025-26 programming year with our September Dinner Meeting at The Venue at Valley Forge Casino. We were joined by speaker Jennifer Peirce Brandt, P.E. of Peirce Engineering, Inc. for a presentation on the 2024-2025 Geotechnical Project of the Year – Roberts Children’s Health at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

The campus expansion project in University City will include an inpatient tower building connected to the flagship hospital.  Peirce Engineering collaborated to provide geo-structural services required to jumpstart the project.  Jen detailed the project’s challenges (the congested city location surrounded by medical buildings, the unknown geotechnical conditions, and adjacent research buildings and potential noise and vibration impacts) and a variety of geotechnical solutions including soil nailing, underpinning, rock bolting, soldier beams and lagging, tieback anchors, and drilled shafts.

Thank you to Peirce Engineering for submitting this project and to Jennifer for presenting to our members!

On Thursday, June 19th, 2025, 81 DVGI members and friends participated in the annual DVGI Golf Outing at Kimberton Golf Club in Phoenixville. Engineers, contractors, and suppliers took time out of their busy schedules to support the DVGI scholarship fund. The weather was perfect, and the refreshments were cold for the 9 a.m. start at the beautiful venue. The outing was a scramble format inviting all levels of golf skill.

The Keystone-Foundation team posted the best team score overall, while the ECS/Peak Utility Locators team had the dubious honor of the worst or “most honest” team score. After the round of golf, participants gathered for lunch and drinks on the patio. Michael Derr, P.E. (Geo-Technology Associates, Inc. (GTA)) won the longest drive hole while Michael Shedlosky (MENARD USA) won the closest to the pin prize, and Andrew Crivelli (GeoConstructors Inc.) mastered the Shortest Driver.

The event was a great chance for DVGI members and friends to socialize in a more casual setting. Shout-out to DVGI Director, Conrad Cho, P.E., LEED AP (Langan Engineering & Environmental Services) for staffing the registration table and roaming the course with refreshments. And a big THANK YOU to DVGI Director, Lei Gu, PE, PMP, ENV SP (Michael Baker International) for his continued efforts as our Golf Outing Chair!

Special thanks to our 21 sponsors which made the event a huge success and provided over $7,000 for the DVGI Scholarship Fund. The money will be distributed to students during DVGI’s annual Student Night dinner meeting next March. Thank you for helping us make this a record-setting year! We hope to see you all again, at next year’s outing.

DVGI concluded its successful run of 2024-25 dinner meetings on Tuesday, May 20th at the Valley Forge Casino. Attendees were in for a real treat as the ASCE Geo-Institute’s 2024-2025 Cross-USA Lecturer, Prof. Richard Bathurst, Ph.D., P.Eng., of the Royal Military College of Canada, presented “From measurement to LRFD calibration of MSE walls.” Prof. Bathurst reviewed how measurements from instrumented full-scale field and laboratory tests of mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls have been used to calibrate load and resistance factors in the AASHTO load and resistance factor design (LRFD) procedure for tensile strength and pullout failure modes of these walls. Such calibrations have improved the accuracy of the MSE wall design process, allowing for more reliable predictions of wall safety and performance as well as value engineering of these structures. Moreover, Prof. Bathurst explained how a simple closed-form solution – easily calculated in a spreadsheet – may be used to incorporate these advances in the LFRD model for MSE walls, negating the need for complex probabilistic simulations for these designs.