Adrian Rodriguez-Marek, Ph.D., F.ASCE, a professor at the Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Tech, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Rodriguez-Marek, after earning his Ph.D., became an assistant professor at WSU, then in 2010 moved to Virginia Tech, where he is now in his current position. His research is in the general area of geotechnical earthquake engineering. He has led NSF-funded reconnaissance teams to study the geotechnical aspects of three separate earthquakes (2001 Southern Peru; 2003 Colima, Mexico; and 2007 Pisco, Peru, earthquakes). These reconnaissance efforts included the evaluation of earthquake damage to water dams and tailing dams.
He has also made contributions to the engineering characterizations of ground motions in general and near-fault ground motions in particular. Rodriguez-Marek has been a leading developer of nonergodic seismic hazard analysis, an approach that enables a more rigorous treatment of uncertainty in ground-motion predictions for hazard applications. His research on single-station standard deviation has been applied in multiple seismic hazard assessments for nuclear power plants. In addition, he has served as a consultant on several high-profile projects, including the seismic hazard and risk assessment for the Groningen Gas Field and seismic hazard assessments for nuclear power plants in South Africa, Spain, Slovakia, Poland, and the United States.
Rodriguez-Marek’s scholarly output includes more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and 50 conference papers, as well as numerous technical reports on seismic hazard assessment. He has advised or co-advised 13 Ph.D. students and has served as an external examiner on numerous doctoral committees in France, Germany, India, and New Zealand.
His honors include the 2021 Outstanding Paper Award from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the 2013 Shamsher Prakash Research Award, and the 2024 Collingwood Prize from ASCE. Rodriguez-Marek is a past chair of the Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering Committee of the ASCE Geo-Institute, currently serves as an editor of the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, and is a past associate editor of several journals, including Earthquake Spectra and the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
He obtained his bachelor and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Washington State University, and his doctorate from UC Berkeley in 2000.
