SGL Team Member Graduates

College Station, TX–

In honor of his graduation ceremony last Friday, we have captured Juan Pablo Alvarado Franco\’s path to becoming 2023 PhD Graduate in Geotechnical Engineering from the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is the 14th PhD graduate from SGL – Stochastic Geomechanics Laboratory!

Alvarado originally hails from Colombia, where he obtained both his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He attended the Universidad de Los Andesfor his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and his Masters degree in Civil Engineering with a focus in Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering.

Once he finished his Masters degree, Alvarado went on to work within industry for five years with Ecopetrol, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in Colombia, and later he worked for Cenit Transporte y Logística de Hidrocarburos, a hydrocarbons transportation and logistics subsidiary company of Ecopetrol.Where he worked as a geotechnical risk professional focusing on data analysis as well as the development and application of models to assess geotechnical hazards along the paths of onshore pipelines. During this time, Alvarado gained an interest in landslide risk assessment and management, something important to him since landslides have been a prevalent natural threat affecting the infrastructure and population of Colombia.

After gaining industry experience, Alvarado decided to apply for a PhD program in the U.S. via the Fulbright Colombia program. He was awarded a FulbrightScholarship to study in the U.S. in 2017.

Alvarado said that while he was researching PhD programs and advisors, he ran across Dr. Zenon Medina-Cetina, Associate Professor in the Zachry Department at Texas A&M. At first he saw that Dr. Medina-Cetina\’s research on Bayesian spatio-temporal risk assessment and management, aligned with his professional interests, particularly after learning more about his lab projects at the SGL – Stochastic Geomechanics Laboratory.

Once Alvarado connected with Dr. Medina-Cetina, he guided him through his PhD application. By Fall of 2018, Alvarado had started his PhD program at Texas A&M as a Fulbright student and under the advisorship of Dr. Medina-Cetina and SGL team member. Later, from the Summer of 2020, Alvarado transitioned to be fully sponsored by Dr. Medina-Cetina until the completion of his PhD program.

Since his move to Texas, Alvarado worked on the application of Bayesian Methods for the risk assessment of landslides, which was the main focus of his PhD Dissertation defense in mid October. Through it’s international and interdisciplinary research, SGL has allowed Alvarado to also conduct and lead research on risk assessment of U.S. supply chains, in projects sponsored by the Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence led by Texas A&M University. With this project, Alvarado has developed leadership and mentoring skills while managing a research team that includes undergraduate, masters, and PhD students as well as working with experts from industry, government, and academia.

Given all that work, Alvarado is excited and continues to be optimistic about the research they are doing and what the future holds. He is most excited about the possibility of applying his scientific, engineering, and technical skills and leadership, into innovative solutions requiring a probabilistic risk framework and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Thanks to the SGL reputation and his emergence as a rising star in his field, Alvarado received multiple job offers, making a decision to join Geosyntec Consultants, an international consulting and engineering firm. He will be joining them at the beginning of the New Year, at their Houston branch.

With his busy schedule, Alvarado has managed to make time for things he enjoys doing outside of work and school including swimming, reading, playing video games and any and everything related to soccer. He married his wife in 2020 in Colombia and she was able to join him and move to College Station in 2021 along with their dog Lucrecia, a social media pet star.