IHRR Visiting Associate Tunisha Gyawali Starts her PhD at UC Berkeley

Tunisha Gyawali is embarking on her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Professor Kenichi Soga. She is excited to work alongside accomplished faculty and program in finding solutions for resilient infrastructure systems through cutting-edge approaches to sensing and monitoring using emerging technologies such as fiber optics, LiDAR, and UAV and informing risk and resilience. Her research interests span infrastructure digital twins, structure-from-motion (SfM), advanced numerical modeling, seismic engineering, liquefaction and geohazard mitigation.

Tunisha brings her professional experience working as a Highway Engineer in the Department of Roads under the Ministry of Infrastructure Development, Government of Nepal where she contributed to managing transportation infrastructure projects like roads, bridges and tunnels supported by international development partners, including the World Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), JICA and China-Aid, as well as coordinated disaster response and recovery efforts. 

She continues her efforts involved with Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) to investigate the aftermaths of the catastrophic Rasuwa flood in Nepal, employing geospatial and remote sensing measures to investigate non-accessible sites. She hopes that her work back home will help document lessons that can inform future hazard mitigation strategies and infrastructure resilience. At Berkeley, Tunisha also looks foward to fostering her passion in the seismic engineering as a Seminars Director for the UC Berkeley Chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), helping foster knowledge exchange within the earthquake engineering community.

Tunisha looks forward to engaging in multi-disciplinary projects within the Soga Research Group and Center for Smart Infrastructure and gaining the skills in integrating advanced geotechnical engineering, numerical simulation and digital twin, and field monitoring to better understand and mitigate risks in network-infrastructure systems to help bridge data-driven engineering solutions with policy implementation. 

Alongside her doctoral research, Tunisha continues her collaboration with IHRR through the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA)-supported project, “Implementing Road Cut Slope Design Policy Guidelines in Nepal,” working with Prof. David Toll, Dr. Ellen Robson, Dr. Bhim Kumar Dahal and Prof. Paul Hughes and developing practical climate-resilient road cut-slope design policy guidelines, training local engineers and investigating geohazard mitigation in landslide-prone regions in Nepal. She also won the Best Paper Presentation by IAEG in November, 2025.

Tunisha’s broader goal is to apply her interdisciplinary expertise and problem-solving approach to challenging engineering problems and making a meaningful contribution to the geotechnical engineering community.

Further Links:

• Tunisha Gyawali’s GeoWorld profile
• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=b3IUrZNxYTwC&hl=en
• UC Berkeley

Photo captions

1. Tunisha Gyawali in front of the Campanile at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has begun her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
2. Tunisha with Dr. Ellen training local engineers to use the developed road cut slope guidelines for Nepal.
3. Tunisha at Kyoto Unviersity, Japan in front of a centrifuge for JICA Training on Countermeasures for Disaster Mitigation in Nepal.