Takeshi Katsumi is Professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies (GSGES), Kyoto University, Japan. He served as Assistant to the Executive Vice-President of Kyoto University for two years from 2012 October, and is currently Vice Dean of GSGES. He graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering, Kyoto University, and obtained his doctoral degree from the same university in 1997. He has research interests in a variety of topics of environmental geotechnics, including waste landfills, remediation of contaminated sites, and reuse of by-products in geotechnical applications. 

He has received several awards including the “JSPS PRIZE” by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, which is annually awarded to ~25 Japanese researchers under 45 years of age from all fields of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. He has been a member of ISSMGE Technical Committee No.215 on Environmental Geotechnics for more than 15 years, and has been the International Secretary of the Japanese Geotechnical Society (JGS) since 2014. He has delivered keynote lectures at several international conferences such as 14th ISSMGE Asian Regional Conference (Hong Kong 2011), 5th Asian Regional Conference on Geosynthetics (Bangkok 2012), and ISSMGE’s 7th International Congress on Environmental Geotechnics (Melbourne 2014). 

He has been involved in several projects regarding the recovery works from the 2011 East Japan earthquake and tsunami, and has been a contributing member to the Central Environment Council of Japan for the last two years.