FACULTY PROFILE: DANTE FRATTA
Dante Fratta's research could change the manner in
which buildings and other parts of the infrastructure are constructed
and located.
 he Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s
newest faculty member is a globetrotting engineer specializing in geotechnical
engineering.
Dante
Fratta joined the department this past summer as an assistant professor.
The native of Argentina joined the faculty from Louisiana State University.
He received his BS in civil engineering from the Universidad Nacional
de Cordoba in Argentina in 1993, then moved to Canada to earn his MS
at the University of Waterloo in civil and environmental engineering
in 1995. He received his PhD in 1999 from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
He spent a year there as a visiting assistant professor before moving
to LSU. Fratta’s interest in civil engineering stems from his
upbringing in Argentina, where his father and uncle were both engineers.
“I always wanted to build stuff,” he said.
His research focuses on elastic and electromagnetic
waves in geomaterials, such as soils and rocks, and measuring those
waves to assess stress changes and distributions of solid and void phases.
He uses seismic methods and ground-penetrating radars to conduct such
measurements. “They can be used to see things we can’t see
with our eyes,” he said.
His research also focuses on detection of anomalies
of infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels, studies of rock mass
stiffness, and assessments of the near-surface underground using non-invasive
tomographic studies.
Fratta says his research has the potential to change
the orientation of civil engineering through utilization of quick and
inexpensive assessments of places where buildings, roads, bridges and
tunnels are built. That could change the manner in which buildings and
other parts of the infrastructure are constructed and located, he said.
In his spare time, Fratta enjoys following politics
and reading history, and spending time with his wife, Julia, and their
two sons, Diego and Julian.
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