Norma Patricia Lopez-Acosta

Dr. Norma Patricia López-Acosta is a Civil Engineer from the Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico) and she earned her Master’s and PhD Degrees from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City (Mexico). She carried out a period of Post-Doctoral Research at the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC, Paris, Francia) in 2011. Dr. López-Acosta is presently a Researcher at the Instituto de Ingeniería of UNAM (IIUNAM). She is also currently Head of the Department of Geotechnics of the IIUNAM. At UNAM she teaches the undergraduate and graduate courseworks: Linear algebra, Water flow in soils, and Numerical modelling in Geotechnics. She is the President of the Technical Committee on Water Flow in Soils of the Mexican Society of Geotechnical Engineering (SMIG). She is the Secretary of the ISSMGE TC201 Dykes and Levees (since 2020) and member of the ISSMGE Technical Committee TC308 Energy Geotechnics. She is the Past Vice President of the SMIG (2015-2016). She has received several awards including the 2010 González Flores Award in the area of Research from the SMIG and was also elected to represent the Mexican Young Geotechnical Engineers in Osaka, Japan, by the SMIG in 2005. She has been involved in a number of research and engineering practice projects in Mexico (protection levees, excavations, levelling of inclined buildings, subway, drainage tunnels, New International Airport of Mexico City, etc.). Her research interests include water flow in saturated and unsaturated soils, special foundations such as the control piles and energy piles, thermoactive structures, thermal properties of soils, vacuum consolidation, regional subsidence, among others. She has edited a number of proceedings and authored some 80 peer reviewed papers on these topics in Journals and National and International Proceedings and over 70 research reports. She has written 2 Books, 1 Series of Research of the IIUNAM, and 9 Chapters of Books. She has been invited to deliver several Lectures in numerous events in Mexico and around the world (Japan, France, USA, Netherlands, Scotland, Canada, Australia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, Korea, Iceland).