Juan M. Pestana-Nascimento joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994 and is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. His research interests include constitutive modeling of soil behavior, geotechnical engineering, soil properties characterization, numerical modeling of soil-structure interaction, environmental geotechnics and geotechnical earthquake engineering. Pestana received his summa cum Laude undergraduate degree from the Universidad Católica Andres Bello, Venezuela, and his Sc.D. at MIT in 1994. He has received numerous awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Arthur Casagrande Award and Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Pestana has served as the program director of the Geoenvironmental Engineering and Geohazards Mitigation program of the CMS Division at the National Science Foundation and as associate principal for the Engineering Design firm Arup. He is group leader of the geoengineering program in CEE at Berkeley.