Nicholas Sitar is the Edward G. Cahill and John R. Cahill Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He received B.A.Sc. in Geological Engineering from the University of Windsor, in 1973, M.S. in Hydrogeology, in 1975, and Ph.D. in Geotechnical Engineering, in 1979, both from Stanford University. He taught in the Geological Engineering Program at University of British Columbia from 1979 to 1981, and joined the faculty in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. Among other appointments he has served as a Member of the Board of the University of California Water Resources Center, and as the Director of the University of California Earthquake Engineering Research Center.

His awards and recognition include the Douglas R. Piteau Award from AEG, the Huber Research Prize from ASCE, The Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, and the James M. Robbins Excellence-in-Teaching Award from Chi Epsilon. He has presented a number of invited lectures including the 20th Hilf Memorial Lecture in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder, 2012; the Korean Geotechnical Society Award Lecture, 2012; a Plenary Lecture at 8th Chilean Geotechnical Engineering Congress, Santiago, Chile, 2014; the Canadian Geotechnical Society Cross-Canada Lecture Tour in 2015; the Keynote Lecture at the International Conference on Discontinuous Deformation Analysis, ICADD 14, Beijing, 2018, and, most recently, the 2023 Sowers Lecture in Atlanta, GA.

His professional and research interests include engineering geology, geotechnical earthquake engineering, rock mechanics, groundwater modeling, groundwater remediation and the application of numerical and stochastic methods to engineering analysis. He is the author and co-author of over 200 publications in geotechnical engineering, engineering geology, groundwater, and groundwater remediation. He has been engaged in research and teaching in environmental aspects of geotechnics since the early 1980’s, leading some of the earliest efforts to characterize the movement of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPL’s) in groundwater, and to develop and evaluate techniques for site remediation. In 1988, jointly with Prof. J.K. Mitchell, he introduced the first course in Environmental Geotechnics at UC Berkeley. This course, in various forms, has been a regular part of the Berkely undergraduate and graduate curriculum since then.