Professor of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia
Dr. Mahdi Taiebat is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He received his Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Davis in 2008, and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Civil Engineering from Iran's Sharif University in 2003 and 2001, respectively. At UBC, he serves as the Associate Head of the Civil Engineering Department, leads the Theoretical and Applied Geomechanics Research Group, and teaches courses in soil mechanics, advanced soil mechanics, constitutive models for soils, and geotechnical earthquake engineering.
Dr. Taiebat's contributions to geotechnical research, professional practice, and education are primarily in theoretical and computational geomechanics, including constitutive modeling of engineering materials, physics and mechanics of granular materials, geotechnical earthquake engineering, and static and dynamic soil-structure interaction. He has (co-)supervised over 30 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, has published over 130 scientific papers, serves on the ISSMGE Earthquake Committee TC203, the ASCE Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering committee, and the Editorial Boards of the Soils and Foundations Journal, Geotechnique Letters, and Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering Journal. He spent a postdoctoral year at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in 2008-2009, and a sabbatical year at MIT in 2015-2016. He received the UC Davis Excellence in Geotechnical Engineering Award in 2007, the Professor Appreciation Award from the UBC Civil Engineering Undergraduate Club in 2011, the ASCE Norman Medal in 2012, and the NSERC DAS Award in 2015.