Nick Oettle, Ph.D., P.E., G.E.

Nick Oettle is a Senior Geotechnical Engineer based in California with more than 16 years of experience in geotechnical and earthquake engineering. He focuses on the design and evaluation of dams and levees, especially their seismic design and risk.

Nick has been involved in the design of over 10 major new dams and dam modifications and the seismic stability evaluation of many embankment dams. Nick has coordinated between government agencies on large projects for important stakeholder issues, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the California Division of Safety of Dams (DSOD). Recently, he has worked on new dams and dam modification projects totaling several billions of dollars in construction value, including Pacheco Dam, Santiago Creek Dam, Santa Felicia Dam, Sites Reservoir, and New Felt Lake Dam. He is currently on the Independent Panel of Experts for the Sacramento Area Levee System.

He has conducted research in the area of numerical modeling on a number of issues, including the assessment of infrastructure to surface fault rupture and the seismic response of dams. This included development of modifications to the constitutive model UBCSAND. Nick traveled to Japan as a member of the GEER reconnaissance team that documented damage from the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake. He has authored over 30 publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences.

Throughout his career, Nick has contributed extensively to the development of industry guidelines and standards. This includes ASCE 7-22 and 7-28, where he authored provisions for the treatment of topographic amplification, consideration of liquefaction-induced downdrag, and design against seismically induced ground deformation. He has also co-authored forthcoming USSD guidelines for conducting earthquake ground motion studies for large dams. Nick is a member of the United States Society on Dams (USSD) earthquakes committee and the USSD subcommittee for the blind prediction of seismic deformation of a dam with liquefaction.

He has also taught classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, given lectures to several local ASCE chapter meetings, universities, agencies, conferences, an ASCE webinar on computational geotechnics, and served as a peer reviewer for several academic journals.

Nick earned his Ph.D. in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, with minors in seismology and numerical modeling, and his M.S. and B.S. in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has been a registered professional engineer in five states.