Costas Synolakis, Professor of Natural Hazards at the School of Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete, broke the 10,000 citation level as reported in Google Scholar. Prof. Synolakis is the Director of TUC’s Natural Disasters and Coastal Engineering Laboratory (NDCEL), and he is also Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering and the Director of USC’s Tsunami Research Center (TRC). He is the Chairman of UNESCO’s IOC Review Board on the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and, formerly, he was the President of the Hellenic Center for Marine Research.
He was awarded the 2014 Sergey Soloviev Medal of the European Geosciences Union on natural hazards and the 2015 Moffat and Nichol Award of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Professor Synolakis was elected on 17 March 2016 as the 45th member of the Academy of Athens, which is the only National Academy of Greece. He is the 4th Academician in the 90 year history of the Academy of Athens to hold the Chair of Earth Sciences. This Chair was vacated in 2012 with the passing of the Professor Nick Ambraseys.
Prof. Synolakis is the leading tsunami engineer whose research over the past three decades spans a wide array of topics including: tsunamis, coastal engineering, water wave theory, breaking waves, runup, near-shore processes, seismology, marine geosciences, and volcanism. He has published numerous highly cited, key papers on these topics. His legacy includes the MOST code (the Method Of Splitting Tsunami model), which has become the standard operational model used for inundation maps along the US Pacific coast. Prof. Synolakis has mentored a generation of students who have themselves become leaders in academia, industry and government. Throughout his career, he has led, driven, inspired, and provided direction to tsunami research and coastal hazards mitigation on a truly global scale. He has organized and led several tsunami survey teams in the last twenty years.
