Prof. Katerina Ziotopoulou

Katerina Ziotopoulou is an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Davis (UC Davis), and a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of California. Prior to joining UC Davis, she served on the faculty at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD (2014) and MS (2010) degrees in Civil Engineering from UC Davis, and her undergraduate 5-year diploma degree in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (2007). Dr. Ziotopoulou specializes in geotechnical earthquake engineering with an emphasis on investigating ground failure due to earthquake-induced liquefaction and cyclic softening, and its mitigation. She combines the development of advanced numerical tools with multiscale experimental methods, the establishment of validation protocols that connect the two, and the upscaling to system-level analyses of case histories accounting for the spatial variability of soil deposits. Dr. Ziotopoulou is the recipient of the 2021 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award of ASCE, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2024 International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering’s TC203 Young Researcher Award, and the 2024 U.S. Universities Council on Geotechnical Education & Research (USUCGER) Early Career Educator Award. She is an Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical & Geoenvironmental Engineering, and an Editorial Board Member of Computers and Geotechnics and the Canadian Geotechnical Journal. She is also serving on the Advisory Board of the DesignSafe NHERI Cyberinfrastructure and has been a member of the Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering Committee since 2014 and of the Innovative Technologies and Tools in Geotechnical Engineering Committee since 2022.