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. She is a faculty advisor in the Center for Geotechnical Modeling of UC Davis, a national shared-used centrifuge facility under NHERI (Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure). Funding for her research has come from federal, state, and industry sources, including a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2020. Her research outcomes have significantly impacted both research and practice and have been adopted in hundreds of projects worldwide. One of Katerina’s key educational and professional development contributions is her sustained and dedicated dissemination of state-of-the-art models and approaches for dynamic numerical modeling of soil and soil-structure systems. She is passionate about teaching and mentoring and has successfully maintained a steady line of funding related to enhancing the mentoring of underrepresented students in engineering, mentoring women through career transitions, and addressing the unique challenges faced by first-generation graduate and international students.

Katerina 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. At UC Davis, she has been honored with a Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award (2023) and an Excellence in Teaching Award (2022). 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 . She has chaired the EERI Student Awards Committee, and the 2021 EERI Annual Meeting. Within ASCE, she was a member of the Organizing Committee of GeoCongress 2022 and later served as the Technical Co-Chair of GeoCongress 2024. She 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.