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. She is Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Scholarship in the College of Engineering, where she manages the reappointment, tenure, peer review, and selection processes for the College’s faculty and researchers, leads faculty development initiatives, and assists with management of faculty hiring strategies and inclusion programs.
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 three leadership positions – Chairman of ACI Committee 236: Materials Science of Concrete (2006-2012), Chair of American Ceramic Society’s Cements Division (2008-2009), and North American Editor Cement and Concrete Research (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. Currently, she serves on the American Concrete Institute’s (ACI) Board of Directors. 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 election the University of California at Berkeley’s CEE Academy of Distinguished Alumni. Dr. Kurtis is Fellow of ACI and the American Ceramics Society.