Biography

Dimitrios Lignos is a Full Professor and Department Chair of the Civil Engineering Institute (IIC Director) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He joined EPFL in 2016 from McGill University, Canada, where he was a tenured Associate Professor. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University (2010) and Stanford University (2009). He holds degrees in Structural Engineering (Stanford University, M.S. 2004, Ph.D. 2008) and Civil Engineering (NTU, Athens, 5-year Diploma 2003). Prof. Lignos’s research focuses on the fundamental understanding of extreme limit states such as structural collapse. The research combines physical experimentation across scales, data-driven techniques along with the development of physics-based and engineering-oriented models for nonlinear finite element analysis to exploit and implement new design paradigms in seismic design. His awards include the 2025 Special Achievement Award by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), the 2022 Raymond Reese Research Prize and the 2019 Walter L. Huber Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) among others. As a member of the Project Team 2, he wrote the new chapters on the steel and composite steel concrete structures in the second generation of Eurocode 8 Parts 1-1 and 1-2 and the new Clause 9 of Eurocode 8 Part 3 for the seismic assessment of existing steel structures. Prof. Lignos is a member of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) S16 technical committee for Steel Structures and SIA-263 in Switzerland. Since 2025 he serves as an Editor in Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, the journal of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering.

Current work

Structural stability of steel and composite-steel concrete structures
Computational mechanics-based simulation
Inverse plasticity problems
Seismic design for deconstruction
Low-damage structural systems
Seismic risk assessment