Professor Pedro Arduino, Ph. D.
University of Washington

Professor Pedro Arduino, Ph. D., University of Washington, has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 Academic Engineer of the Year Award in recognition of his exceptional career as a geotechnical engineering educator, his significant contributions to the development and application of advanced numerical modeling techniques for analysis of soil behavior and the behavior of soil-structure interfaces, and his dedicated efforts as a teacher and mentor of engineering students.
He is a nationally and internationally recognized leader in computational geomechanics. He has been instrumental in the development of constitutive models of soils subjected to earthquake shaking, the development of advanced finite element models for soil-structure interaction, and experiential study of granular soils under complex loading conditions. He has been active in the development of the OpenSees finite element package that has the unusual ability of modeling both soils and structural elements, thus allowing direct investigations of nonlinear soil-structure interaction. He has also been a pioneer in the development of Material Point Method models that can be used to analyze particulate flow slides and to estimate forces due to the impact and damming effects of debris carried by tsunamis.
He has been recognized as one of the best and most popular instructors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is known for his clear and enthusiastic style of lecturing and for being an early adapter of technology in the classroom. He has revamped the graduate soil mechanics laboratory course by installing new testing and automated data acquisition equipment. He also strengthened the graduate curriculum by developing new courses in computational geomechanics and constitutive modeling.
He also has served as an academic leader. He served as Associated Dean of the College of Engineering and as Associate Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.