Rate My Professor David Frost

J. David Frost is the Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor and Regents' Entrepreneur in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received B.A.I. (Hons) and B.A. degrees in civil engineering and mathematics from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, in 1980, along with a Diploma in Technical French, and earned M.S.C.E. and Ph.D. degrees in civil engineering from Purdue University in 1986 and 1989. Prior to his academic career, Frost worked in industry in Ireland and Canada on natural resource projects, including tailings impoundments and artificial sand islands in the Arctic for oil exploration. Joining the Georgia Tech faculty nearly three decades ago, he served as head of the Geosystems Engineering Group, founding director of the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program, and director of the Georgia Tech Savannah campus. He also previously held faculty positions at Purdue University.

Frost's research centers on geotechnical engineering, encompassing geo-mechanics from micro to macro scales, forensic geotechnical engineering, bio-mediated and bio-inspired geotechnics, and the impacts of natural and man-made disasters on infrastructure through digital data collection systems. As founding member and current Chair of the NSF-funded Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, he has led or participated in disaster response teams across the US, Chile, China, Turkey, Japan, India, and other locations. He served as co-PI and Georgia Tech lead for the NSF Engineering Research Center on Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics, which received $35 million in funding across four universities. His contributions have advanced reconnaissance methodologies, failure analyses, infrastructure performance understanding, and community resiliency. Frost has received prestigious awards, including the ASCE H. Bolton Seed Medal (2023), ASCE Life Member Fellow (2024), Purdue University Civil Engineering Alumni Achievement Award (2025), National Academy of Inventors Senior Member Class of 2026, ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (2001), and NSF National Young Investigator Award (1994-1999). Key publications include "Behavior of interfaces between fiber-reinforced polymers and sands" (Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, 1999), "Peak friction behavior of smooth geomembrane-particle interfaces" (Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, 1999), "Bio-inspired geotechnical engineering: principles, current work, opportunities and challenges" (Géotechnique, 2022), and recent works on earthquake damage assessment and bio-inspired geogrids (2024-2026). He teaches the International Disaster Reconnaissance course and has delivered distinguished lectures such as the Osterberg Lecture (2023) and Leonards Lecture (2016).