Jonathan P. Stewart to Present 2026 Stanley D. Wilson Memorial Lecture
Shannon & Wilson and the University of Washington's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are pleased to host the 2026 annual Stanley D. Wilson Memorial Lecture.
This year's Wilson Lecturer, Jonathan P. Stewart, PhD, PE, NAE, will present “Foundation Performance of Millennium Tower In San Francisco, California” on Thursday, April 23 at 5:30 PM at the University of Washington Tower Auditorium. Reception to follow. This event is free to the public.
The Stanley D. Wilson Memorial Lecture was established in 1989 to foster and maintain the spirit of thoughtful and practical engineering solutions.
Lecture Highlights
The Millennium Tower is a 58-story reinforced concrete building that was constructed in San Francisco, California between 2005 and 2009. The Tower is founded on an embedded pile-supported mat with pile tips bearing in dense marine deposits that overlie an over-consolidated marine clay layer known locally as Old Bay Clay. This clay layer experienced stress increases from Tower self-weight and from multiple episodes of de-watering between 2006 and 2018 at the Tower site and neighboring sites. Settlements of the Tower foundation have been measured since 2006 and lateral deflections of the Tower have been inferred and measured since 2009.
Available information on this case history include geotechnical site conditions and data from a monitoring program that tracked foundation settlements, Tower tilt, groundwater levels at the Tower site, and ground inclinations over time.
This lecture will present the case history and its significance, discuss the ground deformation mechanisms that caused the observed movements, describe the degree to which the movements can be predicted, and discuss lessons from this case history for the design of deep foundations for tall buildings in San Francisco and geologically similar regions.
More information on this case history is provided in a case history paper in the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering (Stewart et al. 2023).
Lecture Registration
To attend, please RSVP by April 16 to rsvpsea@shanwil.com.
About the Lecturer
Jonathan P. Stewart, PhD, PE, NAE serves as the Sabol-Scott Professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and is a technical expert in geotechnical engineering, earthquake engineering, and seismology. He works on problems related to hazard characterization and infrastructure response to those hazards. Past leadership positions have included service as a Department Chair at UCLA, Chief Editor of two major journals (Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering and Earthquake Spectra), and as a member of the EERI Board of Directors. He currently serves on the University of California Seismic Advisory Board, Chairs the Steering Committee of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model program, and is a member of the Provisions Update Committee that prepares the NEHRP Provisions for the Seismic Design of Building Structures. Among other professional recognitions, he was a Fulbright Scholar, Joyner Lecturer, and is an elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
