Izuru Takewaki is a Professor of Urban and Environmental Engineering at Kyoto University and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Engineering. His research interests include seismic resistant design of building structures, soil-structure interaction, systematization of structural design process, system identification & health monitoring, surface ground analysis, and inverse problems in vibration. He has won awards from the Architectural Institute of Japan in 1990 and 2004 for research related to earthquake-response in structures and design methods using inverse problem approaches. Takewaki is an active member of numerous civil engineering and earthquake engineering societies and journal review boards, and has held visiting appointments at Cambridge, UC Berkley and San Diego. Takewaki holds a Bachelors, Masters, and Ph D degrees in Engineering from Kyoto University.