Professor Jonathan D. Bray is the recipient of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2022 H. Bolton Seed Medal, which recognizes outstanding contributions to teaching, research, and/or practice in geotechnical engineering. Bray is honored for leading advancements in geotechnical earthquake engineering, including liquefaction ground motions, seismic site response, seismic slope stability, soil-structure-interaction, and surface fault rupture.
Bray has made outstanding contributions in all areas of his career. He has published over 150 journal papers, which span the topics of fault rupture propagation, earthquake ground motion selection, seismic site response analyses, dynamic deformation analyses, and liquefaction engineering. Though his research, Bray has advanced fundamentals and developed engineering procedures and guidelines that are widely used in geotechnical earthquake engineering practice around the world.
In addition to research, Bray has served on technical advisory boards for a wide range of civil infrastructure projects, including major buildings, transit systems, tunnels, bridges, waterfront structures, landfills, water retention dams, and tailings dams. He has also served in numerous leadership and service roles for the profession, including being a driving force behind the founding of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association (GEER), which has advanced the systematic and collaborative collection of high-quality earthquake and other extreme events reconnaissance data.
As an educator, Bray is recognized as a gifted teacher and mentor of undergraduate and graduate students at UC Berkeley, and as a gifted instructor of professionals through numerous short courses. His many honors include the Ishihara Lecture from the ISSMGE, the Joyner Lecture from SSA and EERI, the Huber, Peck, and Terzaghi Awards from ASCE, and election to the National Academy of Engineering.