Research Expertise and Interest

infrastructure sensing, infrastructure modeling, performance-based design, underground structures, energy geotechnics, geomechanics

Research Description

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor in Mineral Engineering and the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure. He is also a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He obtained his BEng and MEng from Kyoto University in Japan and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He was Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge before joining UC Berkeley in 2016. He has published more than 450 journal and conference papers and co-authored "Fundamentals of Soil Behavior, 3rd edition" with Professor James K Mitchell. His current research activities are Infrastructure sensing and modeling, Geomechanics, Performance based design and maintenance of underground structures, and Energy geotechnics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan. He is the recipient of several notable awards, including the George Stephenson Medal and Telford Gold Medal from ICE in 2006, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE in 2007, and the UCB Bakar Prize for his work on commercialization of smart infrastructure technologies in 2022.