DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

Remote sensing is transforming how we understand and engineer the subsurface. Across energy, infrastructure, and environmental sectors, we are now able to observe fractures, stress changes, and fluid interactions as they evolve—not years later, but in real time. Yet major challenges remain: reducing uncertainty in material behavior, assessing geohazards before they escalate, and extracting actionable insights from rapidly growing data streams. I founded the STRIDE Consortium to bring together researchers and industry partners who see this opportunity clearly—to turn advanced sensing, physics-based models, and artificial intelligence into practical tools that reduce risk and cost throughout the life of a reservoir or engineered system. 

Our focus is simple and ambitious: to understand civil and geological systems from microcracks to field-scale seismicity, using technologies such as distributed fiber-optic sensing, acoustic emissions, and deep learning. By anchoring our work in laboratory and field observations, we aim to reveal how damage initiates, organizes, and ultimately controls performance underground or within civil materials. 

STRIDE is built for collaboration. Consortium members shape our research directions, gain early access to new analytics and datasets, and help accelerate deployment of methods that can improve drilling, fracturing, geothermal stimulation, structural health monitoring, and long-term monitoring of civil and geologic systems. 

I invite you to join us—to connect the science of damage evolution with the solutions our industries urgently need. Together, we can unlock more sustainable, resilient, and intelligent subsurface engineering. 

– Jesse Hampton, PhD

Prof. Jesse Hampton, Assistant Professor at UW–Madison, leads the STRIDE Consortium and the Geomechanics and Damage (GeoD) Group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work sits at the intersection of civil and geological engineering, geophysics, and data science—advancing remote-sensing technologies to quantify rock and infrastructure behavior from microcracks to field-scale seismicity.

Prior to joining UW–Madison, Dr. Hampton spent seven years in the oil and gas industry developing advanced geomechanics and sensing technologies with New England Research and Halliburton, contributing to more than 19 patents and numerous publications. Today, his team partners with industry to transform distributed fiber-optic sensing, acoustic emissions, and deep learning into actionable tools for reducing risk and cost in subsurface engineering.