Associate Professor Dominic Assimaki was recently named the 2012 recipient of the Shamsher Prakash Research Award for her work in geotechnical earthquake engineering.
Since 1990, the Shamsher Prakash Research Award has been awarded annually to an outstanding 
young geotechnical researcher, engineer, or scientist who specializes in Geotechnical Engineering and/or Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering with significant independent contributions and excellence in research. The award includes a cash prize in the amount of US $1100.00.
CEE Professor David Frost states "During the seven years as a faculty member within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, Dr. Assimaki has progressed in her career to a point where she is bringing significant credit and recognition to our institution as a result of her academic endeavors, including the research she is performing, the mentoring she is providing to research students, and the impact of the research publications she is producing. As bright as we had hoped the future might be seven years ago, we are even more convinced today of the significant impact that Dr. Assimaki will have as she continues in her career."
Dr. Assimaki earned her B.S. in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece) in 1998. She continued her studies at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT (Cambridge, MA) where she obtained an M.S. in 2000 and a Sc.D. in 2004. During her doctoral studies, she also participated in the European Research Training Network SAFERR as a Young Researcher in GDS (Paris, France, January 2001-September 2002), and received a graduate research fellowship from the National Technical University of Athens (Athens, Greece, September 2002-August 2002). After graduating from MIT, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Crustal Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (February 2004-June 2005). Her primary research interests are in numerical methods in earthquake engineering and geophysics, and include forward simulations of dynamic nonlinear soil response, soil-structure interaction and scattering phenomena in heterogeneous media, as well as inverse problems. She is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of America, the International Association for Computer Methods and Advances in Geomechanics, and the Southern California Earthquake Center.
To learn more about Dr. Assimaki and her research initiatives, visit: http://www.geoquake.gatech.edu.