News
Dominic Assimaki Receives 2009 Casagrande Award from the ASCE Geo-Institute
ASCE recently announced Dr. Dominic Assimaki, assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, as the recipient of the 2009 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award. Dr. Assimaki was nominated for this honor by Professor Paul Mayne who states "Dominic's outstanding contributions to the field of geotechnical earthquake engineering and strong motion seismology make her an exceptional candidate for this award. She is highly accomplished in her research contributions and in teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She also is an active member of the geotechnical engineering community and I enthusiastically nominate her for this recognition."
Established by the Geotechnical Engineering Division (now the Geo-Institute) of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), this prestigious award is a memorial to the outstanding contributions of Arthur Casagrande, Hon. M. ASCE, to the teaching, research, and practice of geotechnical engineering. It is awarded in recognition of outstanding accomplishments as evidenced by completed works, reports or papers in the field of geotechnical engineering. The award is funded by gifts from the many students, colleagues, and friends of Arthur Casagrande to provide professional development opportunities for outstanding young (under 35) practitioners, researchers, and teachers of geotechnical engineering. It is administered by the Geo-Institute through its Honors and Awards Program.
There have been two previous CEE faculty winners of this award. Dr. Jean-Lou Chameau, former professor and school chair of CEE and provost for Georgia Tech, was the first recipient of the award in 1989. Dr. Susan Burns, associate professor in CEE was awarded the honor in 2000.
Dr. Assimaki joined CEE as an Assistant Professor in July 2005. She received her BS in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece) in 1998. She continued her studies at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT (Cambridge, MA) where she obtained an MS in 2000 and a ScD in 2004. During her doctoral studies, she also participated in the European Research Training Network SAFERR as a Young Researcher in GDS (Paris, France, January 2001-September 2002), and received a graduate research fellowship from the National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece, September 2002-August 2002). After graduating from MIT, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Crustal Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (February 2004-June 2005). Her primary research interests are in numerical methods in earthquake engineering and geophysics, and include forward simulations of dynamic nonlinear soil response, soil-structure interaction and scattering phenomena in heterogeneous media, as well as inverse problems. She is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of America, the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics, and the Southern California Earthquake Center. For additional information about Dr. Assimaki's research, visit http://www.geoquake.gatech.edu/index.html.