Martino Leoni received his PhD in 2005 at the University of Parma (supervisor: Prof. Lorella Montrasio). His thesis was concerned with the implementation and use of advanced constitutive models for the mechanical behavior of geomaterials in finite element analysis.
During his PhD he was awarded a research grant from the Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, and during the 3-months stay at the Laboratoire 3S (currently 3SR) he implemented the hypoplastic model CLoE in ABAQUS and used it for the analysis of complex soil-structure interaction problems.
His research work has been mainly focused on the application of numerical analysis in Geotechnical Engineering, and in 2005 he started a 4-year PostDoc at the University of Stuttgart, under the guidance of Prof. Pieter Vermeer). He implemented ACM, a novel creep model for soft clays that deals with anisotropy for the analysis of long-term settlement of foundations.
He has cooperated with the dutch software produced PLAXIS, developer of the widely-used software for finite element analysis of geotechnical engineering problems, recently acquired by Bentley Systems. Since 2007 he has been lecturing at the Advanced Course on Computational Geotechnics for PLAXIS users annually held in Amsterdam. He was Scientific Director of two editions of the Italian PLAXIS course.
In 2009, together with his brother and colleague Lorenzo Leoni, he co-founded the company Wesi Geotecnica, a consultancy which specializes in numerical analysis for Geotechnical Engineering, dealing with critical problems such as the safety assessment of the spent nuclear fuel repository in Olkiluoto, in Finland and prediction of the settlement of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Since 2017 Martino is adjunct professor at the University of Genova and lecturer of the Master course “Geotechnical Numerical Modelling”, 2nd year Civil Engineering.