Dr Rajesh Dhakal is the Head of the Civil Engineering Department at University of Canterbury (UC) in NZ. He received a Bachelor of Civil Engineering Degree in 1993 (winning a gold medal as the top student) from Tribhuvan University (Nepal), Master of Structural Engineering in 1997 (with a gold medal as the top student) from the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand) and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2000. After a post-doctoral tenure at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Dr Dhakal joined UC in 2003.

Prof Dhakal is a globally known Structural and Earthquake Engineering leader with an impressive research profile including close to 500 technical publications (about 200 of them journal articles attracting an H-index of 46), research grants worth more than $7M, and more than a dozen prestigious research awards for research excellence. Prof Dhakal has served in multiple national/international panels, served as an editorial board member for five international journals and delivered invited/keynote lectures in more than a dozen conferences. Prof Dhakal has been serving as the Chief Editor of the journal Bulletin of the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering since 2014. In recognition of his contribution and leadership in earthquake engineering, Prof Dhakal was made a Fellow of Engineering NZ (since 2015) and the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering (since 2017). In 2021, Prof Dhakal was elected the President of the International Association of SPONSE (Seismic Performance of Non-Structural Elements).