Professor Ricardo Dobry is Civil Engineer from the University of Chile, after which he obtained his Master of Science at UNAM, and Ph.D at MIT. Since 1977 he has been faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), currently being the Director of the Center for Earthquake Engineering Research that includes one of the state-of-the-art NEES geotechnical centrifuges. Dr. Dobry's research interests include soil dynamics, geotechnical earthquake engineering and geotechnical dynamic centrifuge testing. He was an active member of the group that performed the new seismic provisions on local site amplification, recently incorporated in U.S. building codes. He is one of the authors of the visionary 20-year research plan in earthquake engineering prepared in 2003 by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute for NSF.

Since 2000 he has leaded at RPI the geotechnical centrifuge experimental site of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), one of 15 interconnected experimental nodes funded by NSF to revolutionize earthquake engineering research in the U.S. Dr. Dobry has published more than 200 technical papers and research reports and has advised 40 PhD and MS theses at Rensselaer.

Professor Dobry has served as consulting expert and member of consulting boards of important and prestigious civil engineering projects, including offshore oil platforms in Venezuela and Australia, earth dams and dikes in California, Puerto Rico and South America, seismic retrofitting of large bridges in NYC, seismic guidelines for design of new bridges in NYC, and the design of the new Rion-Antirion bridge in Greece. 

Dr. Dobry has been invited as a state-of-the-art and keynote speaker at international meetings in U.S., Mexico, South America, Europe, Japan and Australia. He earned the J. James Croes Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1985, and was elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004, for his fundamental contributions to geotechnical earthquake engineering.