Summary Notes on "Research versus Practice in Transportation Geotechnics: Can We Bridge the Chasm?" by D. J. Goodings and S. A. Ketcham, Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, ASCE, Vol. 127, No. 1, January 2001, pp. 26-31.

Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 3/13/01

"… Reams of technical articles and reports are produced. Both practitioners and academic researchers have become exasperated, however, by what they perceive to be a disappointingly small impact of that research spending on practice. … Academic researchers point their fingers at practitioners either for being indifferent to advances in the science of geotechnical engineering or for being unwilling to expand the effort to learn how to use the research tools they develop. Practitioners blame academic researchers for producing unusable, impractical, or unintelligible research, and they identify additional obstacles to research implementation. …"

"The Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Council annually convenes meetings for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss research needs and solutions in the transportation field. … Four members of the TRB geotechnical community who have much experience in different segments of practice and research, and who have well-informed opinions on the problem, agreed to participate in a panel to present their views and to motivate audience discussion. … This article summarizes the discussion and expands upon the issues raised.

… geotechnical engineering faculty more often than not have little or no experience in practice. … As a result, they fail to understand the context into which their research solutions must fit.

… practitioners must improve their definition of both research problem itself and the specifics of the required research end product in a way that researchers can understand. … researchers must make more effort to understand what details of the end product are essential to making the results valuable, understandable, and immediately usable to the practitioner.

… effective communication is the major problem. … transportation centers … are created specifically to act as an interface between academic researchers and practitioners.

… In undertaking research, engineering faculty and their students identify a problem, they propose solutions, they apply solution techniques, they evaluate the results, they prepare reports, and then they present and defend those reports. … the academic system is not serving the specific research needs of practice in most cases. … state Departments of Transportation are ideally positioned to play a pivotal role in the research and implementation… Their failure to take on this role adversely impacts the implementation of research."

"Geotechnical numerical models are a case in point of why practitioners have felt poorly served by academic researchers. … Researchers have too often failed to deliver numerical models that are user friendly and that take into account the education and expertise of the likely user. … As the design engineer considers whether or not to use the numerical model, he or she looks next at the input parameter required to characterize the soil at the site. … Finally, the intended applications for the numerical model may not be clear: the specifics of the geotechnical conditions it was intended to model may not be well defined for the practitioner, or he or she may not understand how to apply the results to the design itself. Practitioners and academics agree that the cumulative result has been a disappointing level of integration of numerical modelling into geotechnical design."

"… A recent survey … conducted by the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering to assess the interests of its readership, provides some degree of insight into the opinions of geotechnical engineers who read the papers written largely by researchers. ASCE received 230 replies to its survey, and 170 (74%) of those respondents were either in private practice or in government agencies. … 69% felt papers in the Journal were too heavily biased toward theory, and 86% wanted publication of more case histories. These figures confirm a discrepancy between what practitioners want and what is being produced. … Practitioners point out that this absence of practical experience among faculty at research universities has an accompanying deleterious effect on engineering teaching, especially in undergraduate senior design courses mandated by ABET, and in design-oriented graduate courses. …"

"The overwhelming majority of engineering academics wish to see their work integrated into practice, and they often blame practitioners for being unwilling to change or to upgrade their skills. … Nonetheless, while academics are aware that they could do a better job with more practical experience, the realities of their work environment in research universities pull them in difference directions. To begin with, hiring preferences at research universities make it clear from the outset that time between completion of a research degree and assumption of a faculty position is spent most advantageously in a postdoctoral position conducting research and producing articles. … What is more, faculty at research universities are largely discouraged from spending time in practice during those portions of the year when university courses are not in session. … Patterns of hires, promotions, and raises indicate that time spent working with practitioners is simply not viewed in itself by university administrations to be as productive or as intellectually expanding as time spent at the university."

"The U.S. National Science Foundation, aware of this growing problem, developed several programs to promote interaction of university faculty with practice, such as the GAOLI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaisons with Industry) and CAREER program. … The GAOLI program is notoriously underutilized in the civil engineering fields, even in contrast to other fields of engineering. And although the prestigious five-year CAREER program is awarded in geotechnical engineering, the potential for substantial additional funding by matching funding brought in from industry during the award period is largely untapped in the geotechnical program. Thus, civil engineering research faculty are either being discouraged from acquiring themselves with the realities of the profession they are intended to support or they are unable to bridge the gap. … practitioners are increasingly reluctant to commit their time, because they perceive the gap in understanding to be too wide to bridge easily and profitably. …"

"The research valued in research university engineering and the physical sciences programs is defined as highly skilled specialization at the cutting edge of one's area of expertise. Little value is placed on time spent making research results accessible to its eventual uses. … This research evaluation template, as it is now structured, however, is ill-suited specifically to geotechnical and more broadly to civil engineering. … Because it is not manufacturing-oriented, there is little potential for significant profit deriving from research breakthroughs. …"

"… researchers often fail to meet the needs of practitioners in the very profession they are expected to support. To a large degree, this is a problem artificially created by university demands on its faculty to conform to an evaluation template ill-suited to both geotechnical and civil engineering. … within the context of this problem, there are working models to bridge some aspects of the gap. … as academic credentials for geotechnical engineering practitioners continue to rise, practitioners will be better trained, both to use the research tools produced and to demand research products from researchers that better suit the needs of the profession."

[Readers who are interested in this article are encouraged to read the original paper in its entirety. Other summary notes on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]