CCEE Ph.D. student Cassie Gann-Philips was awarded a Global Travel Grant from the Seismological Society of America. The grant offers student and early-career members financial support to attend and present at scientific conferences and workshops anywhere in the world. Gann-Phillips, advised by Assistant Professor Ashly Cabas, will attend the American Society of Civil Engineering Geo-Institute’s Geo-Congress 2024 conference in Vancouver, Canada.

Gann-Phillips’ geotechnical earthquake engineering research is focused on the attenuation of seismic waves as they travel through soils. She will investigate the connections between the scales at which different attenuation mechanisms affect the dissipation of seismic energy within porous media. Through her research, she would like to fundamentally change the way we think of soil damping by developing an advanced attenuation parameterization for engineering and seismic design guidelines.

Outside of her Ph.D. studies, Gann-Phillips is a graduate teaching assistant and member of Cabas’ research laboratory group, GeoQuake. She is also a member of Chi Epsilon, the Geo-Institute Graduate Student Organization, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Seismological Society of America. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.