Kil-Wan Ko
Nation/Region-nominated Member
Republic of Korea
Name: Kil-Wan Ko
Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Associate Director, KOCED Geotechnical Centrifuge Testing Center, KAIST
Birthdate: November 1991
Email: kilwanko@
Kil-Wan Ko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KAIST and Associate Director of the KOCED Geotechnical Centrifuge Testing Center. His research focuses on geotechnical earthquake engineering and geohazards, including soil liquefaction, dynamic soil–foundation–structure interaction, seismic site response analysis, and cracking and erosion of levees and dams induced by surface fault rupture.
He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from KAIST. Before joining KAIST in 2025, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis, the University of Southern California and UC Berkeley. He is a member of ISSMGE TC104 (Physical Modelling in Geotechnics) and TC203 (Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering and Associated Problems), and serves as an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Physical Modelling in Geotechnics.
In 2022 he received the Bright Spark Lecture Award from ISSMGE (TC104). In 2025 his paper on energy-based liquefaction evaluation was selected as an Editor's Choice paper in the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, and he received the Young Researcher Award from the Korean Society of Civil Engineers.