Born on November 13, 1954. Bachelor, Master, and Ph. D. of civil engineering at University of Tokyo. Working at Univ. British Columbia in Canada, Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, University of Tokyo and now a visiting professor at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan. Formerly, President of the Japanese Geotechnical Society and Vice President for Asia of ISSMGE. Distinguished visiting professor at IIT Bombay: July – December 2016. Life Fellow of the Indian Geotechnical Society.

Major fields of study

• Geotechnical earthquake engineering concerning intensity of ground motion, liquefaction problems, coseismic landslides, and tectonic subsidence/uplift,
• Slope monitoring for early warning of rainfall-induced landslides,
• Social aspects of geotechnical engineering such as importance of subsoil investigation in georisk management, adaptation to what is called climate change, etc.

Among many awards,

• 1998-1999 Shamsher Prakash Research Award, USA, of Soil Dynamics
• 2005 Heritage Lecturer for ICSMGE in Osaka
• 2019 Ishihara Lecturer, TC203 on earthquake, International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, 7th Int. Conf. Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering, Rome

More than 500 publications in international journals and conference proceedings.

Authored books:

• Ikuo Towhata (2008) Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering, publ. Springer.
• Chief editor for Coseismic landslides: phenomena, long-term effect and mitigation (2022) Ed. Ikuo Towhata, Gonghui Wang, Qiang Xu, Chris Massey, publ. Springer Nature.
• Ikuo Towhata and three more coauthors (2025) Slope Monitoring for Early Warning of Rapid Landslides – Mitigating Rainfall-induced Disasters -. CRC Press, ISBN 9781032647319 (drafts completed).