Amr S. Elnashai holds a B.Sc. (Cairo University 1977) in civil engineering, M.Sc. (Imperial College, London, UK 1980) in reinforced concrete structures, and Ph.D. (Imperial College, London, UK 1984) in structural engineering. He has been on the faculty of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois since 2001. He was the Associate Director of the Mid-America Earthquake (MAE) Center, with primary responsibility towards research coordination, from June 2001 to September 2003, when he became acting Director. In 2004, he was appointed as MAE Center Director.  Before joining the University of Illinois, he was Professor of Earthquake Engineering and Head of the Engineering Seismology and Earthquake Engineering Section at Imperial College (London, UK). Professor Elnashai has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey (UK) since 1998 where he maintains close ties. Other visiting appointments include the University of Tokyo, the University of Southern California and the European School for Advanced Studies in Reduction of Seismic Risk, where he occasionally lectures on structural dynamics.

Professor Elnashai has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on structural analysis, structural dynamics and earthquake engineering. He also lectures at the European School for the Reduction of Seismic Risk in Italy and gives periodic short courses in several European and Middle Eastern universities on seismic assessment and rehabilitation of structures.

Professor Elnashai has worked in the field and reported on most of the damaging earthquakes around the world since the mid-eighties. His technical interests are experimental, analytical and field investigations of the seismic response of concrete, steel and composite buildings and bridges. He has over 200 publications in the field of earthquake engineering. He is the Director for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Multi-Axial Full-Scale Sub-Structured Testing and Simulation (MUST-SIM) Facility at the University of Illinois, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Professor Elnashai is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, member of the Structural Stability Research Council, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the Institution of Structural Engineers (UK) and the Engineering Council (UK). He is a member of the drafting panel of the European seismic design code, the technical expert for the Council of Ministers with the Ministry of Civil Defense (Italy), a member of the code drafting committee for the Ministry of Housing and Construction (Egypt), and is a corresponding member of the International Standards Organization (ISO). In addition he is founder and co-editor of the Journal of Earthquake Engineering, and has served as an editor for the Journal of Constructional Steel Research, The Structural Design of Tall Buildings, and numerous conference proceedings. He was chairman of the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics (UK branch of the European and International Association of Earthquake Engineering) and a Senior Vice-President of the European Association of Earthquake Engineering.

Professor Elnashai’s work on composite structures won the Oscar Faber Medal for the best paper published by the Institution of Structural Engineers (UK). He was awarded the Unwin Prize for the best Ph.D. thesis in Civil and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College and in 2002 his paper on high rise high strength concrete buildings won the best paper award of the Journal of Structural Design of Tall Buildings.  In 2003, Professor Elnashai was named a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.