Rate My Professor Joe Scalia

Joe Scalia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University, specializing in geoenvironmental and geotechnical engineering. His research and teaching center on the convergences of soil mechanics with contaminant hydrology, geology, environmental engineering, hydrology, mechanical engineering, and hydraulics. Scalia is affiliated with the Center for Contaminant Hydrology, where he contributes to advancements in environmental geotechnics. He teaches courses including CIVE 558: Containment Systems for Waste Disposal and CIVE 355: Introduction to Geotechnical Engineering.

Scalia holds a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Bucknell University (2007), an M.S. in Geological Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2009), and a Ph.D. in Geological Engineering from the same institution (2012). Prior to joining Colorado State University, he worked as a senior associate at Exponent (formerly Failure Analysis Associates) in the Environmental and Earth Sciences Practice in Bellevue, Washington, and Natick, Massachusetts. His research interests encompass flow and contaminant transport in saturated and unsaturated soils, geosynthetic clay liners, clay-polymer composites, mine wastes, tailings, unsaturated terramechanics, and geo-water interactions. Notable contributions include co-authoring the open-source textbook Modern Subsurface Contaminant Hydrology with Professor Emeritus Tom Sale, which introduces a new paradigm for contaminant transport in natural subsurface settings. He has also contributed to the first manual of practice in the field alongside colleagues Christopher Bareither and Charles Shackelford. Scalia has published extensively in journals such as the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering. His honors include the 2021 Robert and Mitchell Landreth “Steward of the Environment” Award from the Geosynthetic Institute, the 2018 Geosynthetics International Best Paper Award, the 2025 Meroney Family Chi Epsilon Award for Teaching Excellence, the 2021 Outstanding Faculty Performance Award from his department, and the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) Fellowship.