Professor J. David Frost
Dr. J. David Frost is the Higginbotham Professor in Civil Engineering and a Regents Entrepreneur at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He obtained BA and BAI degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and MS and PHD degrees in Civil Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Throughout his career, he has studied natural and man-made disasters and their impacts on infrastructure at multiple scales using digital data collection systems.
From 2008 to 2026 he served as Co-Chair/Chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association that coordinates geotechnical responses to natural and man-made disaster worldwide. He has personally participated on and/or led teams responding to disasters in US, Chile, China, Turkey, Japan and India amongst others.
From 2015 to 2025, Frost served as co-PI and Bio-inspiration Thrust Lead for the NSF Engineering Research Center on Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics. Frost has graduated over 50 PhDs in disaster studies, data science and geosynthetics, about 50% whom have gone on to academic careers themselves. In 2026, he became President of the Geosynthetic Institute, a global industry member funded organization that conducts research, education, certification and accreditation across the global geosynthetic industry ecosystem.
Frost teaches courses on International Disaster Reconnaissance and Infrastructure Failure Analysis. The former includes a 10-day international field trip to areas that have been impacted by extreme events and provides students with first-hand experience of the incredible forces that nature can bring on human infrastructure, learn about post-disaster reconnaissance methods and observe reconstruction activities. Through this course, he has taken more than 150 students to Japan, China, India, Nepal and S. Korea.
Apart from working directly with industry on major projects, Frost is contributing to the geotechnical engineering industry ecosystem through patents, licenses and other intellectual property paths. He has received 5 US patents, all of which have been licensed by industry with an additional 3 patents pending. He has co-founded two data software companies emerging from his research activities and is technical advisor to a third infrastructure company that is based on his research patented products. In 2026, he was elected to the US National Academy of Inventors.
