Dr Amalia Giannakou is a Principal Engineer at GR8 GEO. She is a registered Civil Engineer in California and has over 15 years of experience in site characterization, geotechnical design and advanced numerical modeling for large infrastructure projects around the world. She has served as the technical manager for the site characterization, geotechnical design and advanced numerical modeling activities for large infrastructure projects. She was the technical manager for GR8 GEO’s Offshore Wind Farm projects in the East Coast of the US, Taiwan and Korea, which include detailed site characterization using geophysical and geotechnical data for the development of idealized stratigraphy and geotechnical parameters for advanced numerical modeling of foundations, development of design ground motions from PSHA and site response analyses, 3D SSI analyses of Offshore Substation and Wind Turbine foundations comprising monopiles and suction buckets under monotonic, cyclic and earthquake loading and 3D SSI analyses for the assessment of foundation installation effects.
Previously she developed and managed Fugro’s European earthquake engineering group while also serving as the geotechnical division manager of Fugro’s operating company in Turkey since 2011. From 2008 to 2011 she worked at Fugro’s international earthquake engineering group in California, USA, where she was part of the team that conducted the analytical work to evaluate the vulnerability of the BART Transbay Tube to liquefaction induced demands after completing her PhD in dynamic soil-structure-interaction.
She has served as the lead geotechnical engineer and technical manager for a range of large multidisciplinary infrastructure projects involving site investigation, site characterization and engineering design services. Select projects include the site characterization, earthquake engineering studies and foundation design services for the Izmit Bay, the 3rd Bosphorus Bridge and the “1915 Çanakkale” bridges in Turkey, the site characterization, geotechnical design and development of ground motions for the SOCAR Oil Gas and Petrochemical Complex Project in Azerbaijan, the probabilistic fault displacement hazard evaluations for the TANAP pipeline in Turkey and the preliminary earthwork design for the Istanbul New Airport in Turkey
She has managed the advanced numerical modeling activities for the seismic performance assessment of the Emshaven-Delfzijl levee and the Eemskanaal levee in Groningen, the Netherlands, the evaluation of the performance of typical residential houses in Groningen underlain by liquefiable sands, the results of which were adopted in the local seismic code, the evaluation of the seismic performance of an existing tank on improved reclamation fill in South Asia, the dynamic SSI evaluations for the jetty and the pipeline of an LNG Import Terminal in Southeast Asia and the 3D SSI numerical analyses for offshore wind farm projects in the US.
Over the last decade she has managed numerous earthquake engineering projects in several seismically active areas around the world including Turkey, California, Azerbaijan, U.A.E, Qatar, Russia, India, Korea and Philippines. Most of these projects typically included dynamic site characterization, probabilistic seismic hazard analyses, site response analyses, liquefaction evaluations, and soil-structure interaction analyses.