David Groholski

Dr. Groholski specializes in soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering with proficiency in the analysis of civil infrastructure, foundations, retaining structures, earthquake engineering, and numerical methods. His technical expertise also includes soil mechanics applied to slope stability, expansive soils, and dynamic soil behavior. 

Dr. Groholski provides geotechnical consultation on the engineering design, construction, and performance of civil, urban, and rural infrastructure. His project portfolio includes adjacent constructions in urban environments; construction claims; grain silos; housing communities and individual residences; dams, cofferdams, reservoirs, and canals; and cantilever, conventional gravity, prefabricated modular, and mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls.

Dr. Groholski has performed research on topics including seismic site response analysis, characterization of soil constitutive behavior and pore pressure response, constitutive modeling, and the development of integrated tools for predicting, monitoring, and controlling ground movements due to excavations. He has experience in soil mechanics, strength characterization, static slope stability analyses, liquefaction analyses, geotechnical monitoring, rigid and flexible retaining walls, deep excavations, foundation design, earth pressures, soil settlement and analysis of piles. Dr. Groholski also has experience in conducting studies on ground vibrations, site amplification, wave propagation, liquefaction, and lateral spreading.

Prior to joining Exponent, Dr. Groholski was a research assistant in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His doctoral research focused on the development of an inverse analysis framework to extract dynamic (seismic) soil behavior and excess pore pressure response from downhole array field measurements. During his time at UIUC, Dr. Groholski contributed to other research projects including the development of next-generation laboratory soil testing devices and the development of the 1-D site response analysis program, DEEPSOIL. He also has experience with laser scanning activities, image-based reasoning techniques, neural network models, and the computer programming languages of Java, C++, and Visual Basic. He has assisted in the teaching of an undergraduate course on the fundamentals of geotechnical engineering.