Costas Synolakis is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California. He studies the impact of natural hazards, and particularly tsunamis, extreme flooding events and climate change on beaches. He has led or participated in about 30 scientific expeditions in twenty one countries, practically in all of the world’s oceans and seas. His work in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Aleutian islands, the Marquesas, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kenya and Oman was groundbreaking and highly cited.
Professor Synolakis grew up in Athens, then attended the California Institute of Technology, where he did all his professional degrees. In 1996, Costas Synolakis founded the USC Tsunami Research Center. He and his group produced all official hazard maps for tsunamis for the State of California. In the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami, Professor Synolakis was appointed in the only Chair in Greek universities at the time, on natural hazard mitigation.
The Laboratory which he founded at TUC studies extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, fires and the impact of waves on beaches, particularly erosion, as well as wildfire evolution. In 2020, he resigned from TUC, to pursue his research interests in the Academy of Athens Professor Synolakis has received both major awards of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the 2015 Moffat and Nichol Coastal Engineering Award and the 2019 International Coastal Engineering Award. In 2014, he received the Sergey Soloviev Medal of the European Geophysical Union.
Professor Synolakis now holds the Chair of Earth Sciences in the Academy of Athens, and since 2019, he is the Secretary of the Division of Natural Sciences of the Academy. He is also a member of the Academia Europae and is the Chair of the National Committee on Climate Change of Greece.
