People
Faculty
Domniki Asimaki, Sc. D.
Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering
Domniki joined the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at Caltech in 2014. She was previously a faculty member at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. She has a bachelor’s diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (1998), and an MS (2000) and PhD (2004) from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Her research combines elements of geotechnical engineering, geophysics, computational mechanics, and structural dynamics. Domniki is associate editor for Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, for Earthquake Spectra (EERI), and for Soils and Foundations of the Japanese Geotechnical Society. Her awards include the 2009 Arthur Casagrande Award from the ASCE Geo-Institute, the 2012 Shamsher Prakash Research Award in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and the 2014 Young Investigator award of the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering.
Curriculum vitae (pdf)
Staff
Postdoctoral Scholars
Kami Mohammadi, Ph.D.
Kami got his Bachelor’s degree from Chamran University of Ahvaz (Ahvaz, Iran), his Master's degree from the School of Engineering at the University of Tehran (Tehran, Iran), and his Master's and PhD degrees from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His primary research interests include topics in geotechnical earthquake engineering (liquefaction, site effects, soil-structure interaction), numerical methods in engineering (FEM, FDM, BEM, mesh free methods), and elastodynamics (wave propagation in heterogeneous media). He is currently working on 3D topographic amplification of seismic ground motion.
Elnaz Esmaeilzadeh Seylabi
Elnaz joined Professor Asimaki’s group as a postdoctoral scholar in January 2017. She received her BS in Civil Engineering and MS in Earthquake engineering both from the Sharif University of Technology, Iran, and her PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles. As a researcher, Elnaz is primarily interested in developing tools for achieving the synergy between the computational modeling and data analytics to better understand the interaction of the built environment with the earthquake hazard and improve the resilience of civil infrastructure systems.
Utkarsh Mital, Ph.D.
Utkarsh got his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (Mumbai, India), and his Master’s and PhD degrees in Applied Mechanics from California Institute of Technology. He is interested in using machine learning paradigms to identify areas susceptible to natural hazards. His current research focuses on incorporating in-situ and remotely-sensed geological and hydrological data to develop maps of areas that are susceptible to soil liquefaction.
Graduate Students
Jian Shi
Jian got his Bachelor's degree in Hydraulic Engineering from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), and his Master's degree in Civil Engineering from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on physics-based ground deformation forecasting; he is specifically developing and validating constitutive models and algorithms to improve existing site-specific response analyses, and on integrating the results into ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) and seismological models.
Kien T. Nguyen
Kien received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Geotechnical Engineering from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology of Vietnam National University. His research interests include soil dynamics, soil – structure interaction and numerical methods in geotechnical engineering. His research focuses on physics-based modeling of pipelines subjected to transient seismic loading as well as to permanent deformations due to liquefaction or landslides.
Peyman Ayoubi
Peyman got his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Guilan University (Rasht, Iran) and his Master’s degree from Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran). He joined California Institute of Technology (Caltech) at Fall 2015. His research interests includes Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering in general and site response analysis in particular.
Danilo Kusanovic
Danilo received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Civil Engineering at the Technical University Federico Santa María in Chile, as well as a second master in Analysis and Design of Earthquakes Resistant Structures at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. During his undergraduate and postgraduate thesis he worked in the area of reliability-based optimization for structural systems. Currently he is a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology – CALTECH – working under the supervision of Domniki Asimaki. His research focuses in general on numerical methods in engineering applied to soil-structure interaction (SSI) and soil-fluid-structure interaction (SFSI).
Joaquín García-Suarez
Joaquin received his "Ingeniero Industrial" diploma from University of Seville (Seville, Spain) in 2013, and a master's degree in Space Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2016. Before joining Caltech for graduate studies he worked as structural engineer for Next Force Engineering (Seville, Spain) for more than two years. His interests range from solids and structural mechanics to soil-structure and fluid-structure interaction. He is currently working on fluid-structure-soil interaction problems concerning buried water reservoirs subjected to seismic loading.
Former members of the Asimaki Group
Postdoctoral Scholars
Walter Yang, PhD
Doctoral Students
Varun Varun, PhD 2010
Wei Li, PhD 2010
Seokho Jeong, PhD 2014
Masters Students
Alexandros Kalos
Visitors
Alberto Pettiti, PhD
Yaqun Liu, PhD
