Tuesday, 17 February 2026 at Noon | 490 Cory Hall
Registration is now closed.
Professor Kenichi Soga
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering | University of California, Berkeley
Host: Stuart McElhany, BSAC Seminar Committee
ABSTRACT
Designing, constructing, maintaining, and upgrading civil engineering infrastructure requires fresh thinking to reduce materials, energy, and labor. Meeting this goal depends on a deeper understanding of infrastructure performance - during construction and throughout its service life - enabled by innovative monitoring. The future of infrastructure will rely on smarter information: rich data from monitoring can catalyze new approaches to design, construction, operation, and maintenance of infrastructure systems, including those linked to user behavior patterns. Recent advances in sensing are creating new opportunities to transform condition assessment and monitoring. Computer vision, distributed fiber-optic sensing, LiDAR, wireless sensor networks, and satellite remote sensing can deliver high-resolution measurements over broad areas at relatively low field-scale cost. This talk highlights recent activities at the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure.
BIO
Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He directs the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure and is also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focuses on infrastructure sensing and modeling, geomechanics, underground infrastructure, and performance-based design and maintenance—leveraging technologies such as distributed sensing and data analytics to improve the resilience and sustainability of civil infrastructure systems. He is a member of the US 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 has received several notable awards, including the George Stephenson Medal and Telford Gold Medal from ICE, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and Ralph B. Peck Award from ASCE, and the UCB Bakar Prize for his work on commercializing smart infrastructure technologies.
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