Research Expertise and Interest

civil infrastructure systems, geosystems, geotechnical engineering; landslides; drones; satellites; earthquakes; natural hazards; infrastructure resilience; informatics, engineering justice;

Research Description

Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos is an associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering.  Her research focus and expertise is on assessing and mitigating the impact of multi-hazard stressors on geotechnical engineering infrastructure, with particular emphasis on challenges due to age-related deterioration, population growth and densification, natural and human-made hazards, and new demands from climate change. She particularly investigates (1) the response and health assessment of flood protection systems such as levees that are old, rapidly deteriorating and threatened by increasing demands due to increasing water levels as well as societal inequities in flood risk exposure, (2) the performance of critical systems such as ports during earthquakes, (3) the effects of man-induced vibrations from pile driving in dense urban environments and near critical infrastructure such as bridges and retaining walls, and (4) the use of new materials, advanced sensing and next-generation laboratory and field testing to inform us on efficient and sustainable mitigation of aging systems. She uses a combination of computational models that are always tied to physical experimental testing in the laboratory and/or the field, and field measurements or monitoring data. Her work has involved the development of customized and new experimental setups that allow us to gain insights into the processes involved, the use of advanced computational techniques (finite elements, finite differences and discrete elements), and the incorporation of new materials and monitoring technologies as part of considered mitigation schemes.