Prof. Kenichi Soga

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor in Mineral Engineering and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Soga is also the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves as a Special Advisor to the Dean of the College of Engineering for Resilient and Sustainable Systems.

Soga’s research focuses on infrastructure sensing, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics from micro to macro. He has published more than 500 journal and conference papers and is the co-author of “Fundamentals of Soil Behavior” with Professor James K Mitchell.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, 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 currently one of the three editors-in-chief of “Data-Centric Engineering”.

He has received 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, the 63rd Rankine lecture in 2025, and the UCB Bakar Prize for his work on commercializing smart infrastructure technologies in 2022.