Robert Kayen
Education and academia. 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. Since 1991, 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 University of California, Berkeley  in 2018. He has previously 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. Honors. Selected awards include the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. For his 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. 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 (ASCE). In 2017, he was the ASCE GeoInstitute - UC Berkeley Distinguished Lecturer in Civil Engineering. Rock climbing and ski mountaineering. Robert Kayen is an American rock climber who completed the first solo ascent of El Capitan‘s West Buttress in Yosemite National Park in 1982. The eleven-day solo climb followed the  original route on the West Buttress, first ascended by Layton Kor and Steve Roper in 1963. 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, skiing via the John Muir Trail and the high-elevation portions of the Tahoe–Yosemite Trail.