Nicholas Yafrate, Ph.D., P.E.

His experience includes design, permitting, and construction quality assurance for landfills, elevated temperature landfills (ETLFs), ash impoundments, remediation sites, and dams. He manages design teams and field construction oversight and leads many of Geosyntec's geotechnical instrumentation design, installation, and monitoring projects.  

An experienced engineer, Nick has provided solid waste containment services at dozens of sites across North America. His projects include design for sites with challenging conditions such as landfills exhibiting elevated temperature conditions (ETLF) and facilities over soft or unstable foundations. He has worked on more than a dozen sites that exhibit potentially ETLF conditions. This work has included development and implementation of state-of-the art temperature and pressure monitoring systems, landfill overlay systems, coolant systems, and internal drainage systems. The temperature and pressure monitoring systems use fiber optic distributed temperature sensing (FODTS) and vibrating wire technologies which Nick helped develop for harsh ETLF conditions. His work has included design for facilities over soft clay foundations where strengthening of the underlying soft clays with preloading and/or wick drains is necessary to maintain stability during and after construction. In 2017 Nick was recognized as one of the "WASTE 360 40 UNDER 40 rising stars and young professionals within the industry."

Nick has served as the lead geotechnical instrumentation engineer on dozens of projects across the United States. The instrumentation projects have included dams, mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) berms, landfill slopes, ash impoundments, sheet pile walls, and other geotechnical structures. The instrumentation designs are focused on providing Geosyntec's clients with confidence during construction, the life of the structure, and meeting regulatory monitoring requirements. Nick leads the design and installation of geotechnical instrumentation, along with the development of monitoring plans and assessment of the resulting data. Many of these systems are fully automated with alarm features and web-based interfaces.

Contact Nick Yafrate at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or +1-978-206-5792.