Formerly called soil mechanics and foundation engineering, geotechnical engineering today is much broader in scope and includes such topics as the mechanics and properties of rock and transitional materials, underground construction, earthquake engineering, foundation soil improvement, and the remediation of contaminated soils and groundwater. As a formal discipline within civil engineering, however, it is relatively new in comparison with other engineering fields such as hydraulics, structural engineering, and surveying.

Soil mechanics was not formally a part of the civil engineering curriculum in most US colleges and universities until after WWII, although graduate programs in soil mechanics had existed at Harvard and MIT since the early to mid-1930s. However, things were different at the University of Washington, where geotechnical engineering has had a long and illustrious history.

It began in 1929 when Richard Tyler joined the UW faculty as Dean of Engineering and Head of the Department of Civil Engineering. He had some soils testing equipment built in the CE shops and set up a small testing laboratory.

In 1934, Prof. Tyler hired a young instructor, Robert Hennes, who had done his MS thesis at MIT several years earlier under Karl Terzaghi, the founding father of Soil Mechanics. The first formal UW undergraduate course in the new field was offered in the Fall of 1935, making it one of the first such courses offered in the US. Activities increased considerably when Richard Meese joined the faculty in 1946, a year in which the first MSCE degrees with a major in soil mechanics were awarded. Additional courses were offered including several at the graduate level.

Notable graduates in the 1950s and 60s included George Yamane and Liam Finn. Mehmet Sherif joined the faculty in 1963, Robert Hennes retired in 1974, and when Richard Meese retired in 1981, Sunirmal Banerjee replaced him. Sherif died in 1984, and Banerjee in 1996. Present geotechnical faculty include Steven Kramer (1984), Robert Holtz (1988), Teresa Taylor (1992) and Pedro Arduino (1997).

The geotechnical faculty have continued to teach basic soil mechanics and foundation design for undergraduates. Engineering geology I was added in 1992. Our graduate course offerings have expanded considerably in the past decade and now include in addition to advanced soil mechanics, foundation engineering, and engineering geology, such courses as soil properties, slope stability, seepage, soil improvement, rock mechanics, soil dynamics, earthquake engineering, retaining structures, constitutive modeling of soils, and geosynthetics engineering.