Katerina Ziotopoulou

Dr.  Ziotopoulou’s mission  is  to advance  numerical  simulation  tools  by  making  them better connected to the body of information on soil behavior and thus achieve seismic resilience  and  sustainability  of  geostructures. Together with  her  research  group,  her goals are to: (a) improve our understanding of the response of liquefiable soil-structure systems through advanced multi-scale experimental testing, (b) advance and perform reliable numerical simulations and develop usable simulation tools, and through these (c)  facilitate  advances  in  performance-based  design  across  a  range  of  foundation design and ground improvement methods. Her efforts have produced numerical tools that are currently widely used by research and practice nationally and internationally, towards  assessing  and  managing  risks  associated  with  earthquake-induced  ground failure.

Awards & Honors

• 2024 International Society of Soil Mechanics & Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE) TC203 Young Researcher Award
• 2024 Early Career Educator Award- U.S. Universities Council on Geotechnical Education & Research (USUCGER) 
• 2023 Graduate Program Advising and mentoring Award- UC Davis 
• 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis 
• 2022 Outstanding Dataset Award , NSF NHERI DesignSafe Cyber Infrastructure 
• 2021 CAREER Award - United States National Science Foundation (NSF) 
• 2021 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 
• 2019 ACCELERATE Teaching Fellow - UC Davis 
• 2019 Wakeham Mentoring Fellow - UC Davis 
• 2017 Engaged Learning Community Award, UC Davis
• 2017 Greek international Women Award (GIWA) in Science 
• 2016 ASCE 2016 Outstanding Reviewer Recognition
• 2016 Teacher of the Week – Virginia Tech CIDER
• 2015 ExCEEd (Excellence in Civil Engineering Education) Fellow - ASCE
• 2015 W(H)YDOC Young Doctors in Geomechanics Fellow.
• 2012 Idriss Award for Excellence in Geotechnical Engineering