Kimberly E. Kurtis, PhD, FACI, FACerS
Raymond Allen Jones Chair and Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Professor (Courtesy Appointment), School of Materials Science and Engineering
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship, College of Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
Dr. Kimberly (Kim) E. Kurtis is the Raymond Allen Jones Chair and Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
Dr. Kurtis joined Tech’s faculty in January 1999. She earned her BSE (1994) in Civil Engineering from Tulane University under a Deans Honor Scholarship and her MS (1995) and PhD (1998) in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a Henry Hilp Fellow and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Fellow. Dr. Kurtis’s innovative research on the multi-scale structure and performance of cement-based materials is motivated by the broad societal need to address the global challenge of equitably providing infrastructure for all people in the most sustainable and economical ways possible. Her group’s innovative work combines advanced characterization methods, novel synthesis and manufacturing approaches, and data science techniques to generate new understanding that improves the design, utilization and performance of these complex materials, resulting in more than 200 technical publications, as well as four US patents.
She has held four leadership positions – Chairman of ACI Committee 236: Materials Science of Concrete (2006-2012), Chair of American Ceramic Society’s Cements Division (2008-2009), North American Editor Cement and Concrete Research (2019-present) and North American representative on the Steering Committee for the International Congress on the Chemistry of Cement (2019-present) – central to advancing science-based research on cement-based materials. In addition, Dr. Kurtis has served as Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering and on the Editorial Board of Cement and Concrete Composites. She previously served the American Concrete Institute (ACI) on its Board of Directors, Technical Activities Committee and Educational Activities Committee. Her interest in translation of technological innovation into practice has prompted her membership on the Board of Directors for the minerals producer PureBase (Ione, CA) and on the Board of Advisors for the start-up Sublime Systems (Somerville, MA).
Dr. Kurtis has been honored with ACI’s Walter P. Moore, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award (2005), ACI’s Del Bloem Award for Service (2013), Outstanding Senior Undergraduate Research Mentor Award at Georgia Institute of Technology (2013), the ACI James Instruments Award for Research on NDE of Concrete (2008), Award for Outstanding Article in ASTM’s Journal of Testing and Evaluation (2010), ASCE’s Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (2013), ACI’s Anderson Medal (2019), and a 2020 Le Chatelier Distinguished paper award from Cement and Concrete Research for “Dissolution kinetics of trapped air in a spherical void: Modeling the long-term saturation of cementitious materials”. She was elected to the University of California at Berkeley’s CEE Academy of Distinguished Alumni in 2021. Dr. Kurtis is Fellow of ACI and the American Ceramics Society.