Robert Kayen

Robert Kayen is a civil engineer, geologist, and professor of civil engineering and environmental engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, Industry Faculty. He is a leading international expert in the fields of earthquake engineering, soil liquefaction, and ground failure. Kayen's research focuses on geotechnical engineering, engineering characterization of natural hazards and extreme events, and earth science aspects of civil engineering. His works have been applied in earthquake engineering design of building foundations, bridge abutments, and lifeline and environmental systems.

Robert Kayen was born in New York, United States in 1959. He earned his B.S. in civil engineering and geology in 1981 from Tufts University, M.S. degree in geology in 1988, and Ph.D. in engineering under the supervision of James K. Mitchell at the University of California, Berkeley in California in 1993. Since 1991, he has worked as a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Professor Kayen joined the faculty of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California Los Angeles in 2007. He has also served on the faculties of Kobe University, Japan and University of California, Berkeley as a visiting professor. Kayen has authored several hundred journal articles and published studies in the fields of earthquake engineering, LIDAR Geomatics, engineering geophysics, methane hydrate disassociation, and marine-engineering geology and marine-geotechnics.

Selected awards include the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. For contributions to the science-case of United States vs. Montrose Chemical Corp. et al., he received a Commendation awarded by the United States Department of Justice. He received the Ames Honor Award in 2010 from NASA-Ames Research Center for unique applications of the spectral analysis of surface waves and ground penetrating RADAR. Kayen has served on the editorial board of the Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering Journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Robert Kayen is an American rock climber best known for the first solo ascent of the West Buttress of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, an eleven-day climb of one of the original siege-routes on the face first climbed by Layton Kor and Steve Roper. Kayen skied the first winter traverse of the Sierra Nevada Mountains along a four hundred mile route between Mount Whitney and Lake Tahoe in 1984 and 1985, ski-mountaineering via the John Muir Trail with John Webster, and alone for the Tahoe-Yosemite Trail.