Robert Kayen was born in New York, NY, 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. From 1991-2023, he has worked as a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Kayen joined the faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007, and the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. He previously served as a visiting professor at Kobe University, Japan. Kayen has authored over four hundred journal articles, conference papers, and published studies in the fields of earthquake engineering, LIDARgeomatics, InSAR persistent scatterer-synthetic aperture radar interferometry, engineering geophysics, methane hydrate disassociation, and marine-engineering geology and marine-geotechnics.[2]
Honors
Kayen received the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.[3] For contributions as a court-appointed expert to the scientific studies supporting United States vs. Montrose Chemical Corp. et al., he received a Commendation awarded by the United States Department of Justice.[4] He received the NASA Ames Honor Award from the NASA Ames Research Center for applications of the spectral analysis of surface waves and ground-penetrating RADAR.[5] Kayen has served on several editorial boards including the Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
