Professor James Marshall Kelly, world-renowned pioneer, expert, and leader in the field of seismic isolation and energy dissipation, died on 23 September 2025 at the age of 90. He served in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (formerly Civil Engineering) at the University of California, Berkeley, as a faculty member from 1965 to 1995, then as Professor in the Graduate School until 2004, and thereafter as Professor Emeritus. He was probably the most influential figure in the development, design and implementation of seismic protection technologies, encompassing both seismic isolation and supplemental energy dissipation.
James Kelly was born on 25 May 1935 in Motherwell, Scotland, a small industrial town just south of Glasgow. He finished high school when he had just turned sixteen, but being too young was not admitted to Glasgow University until 1952, where he studied the four-year civil engineering program. He graduated in 1956 with First Class Honors, the only one in his class to do so that year. He then travelled to the United States to continue his engineering education. He obtained his Master of Science degree from Brown University in 1959 and his PhD degree from Stanford University in 1962. His PhD thesis, entitled Moving load problems in the theory of viscoelasticity was directed by Prof. Wilhelm Flugge of the Division of Engineering Mechanics.
His early work involved dynamic impact on beams, dislocation dynamics and high-speed cameras. While his applications of dynamics to engineering mechanics were very rigorous, Prof. Kelly was also interested in practical applications of his research. For example, he wrote that his research on impact of masses on infinite beams could be applied to the design of guide rails in California highways and provided specific examples on how it could be used for that purpose. While working on his dissertation, and many years before the creation of what we now know as Silicon Valley, he also worked part-time for a small high-tech company, which today would be considered a startup, that developed and fabricated high-speed cameras. Soon after completing his thesis, he joined this company full time. The high-speed cameras that he worked on were mechanical rather than electronic, as today’s digital cameras are, and the high speed was achieved by the use of spinning mirrors. He worked on the dynamic analysis of the spinning mirrors and used the cameras in several projects, photographing explosive loading and shock loading on mechanical systems. He held a two-year teaching fellow position in the Division of Engineering Mechanics at Stanford, where he taught graduate courses in Engineering Mathematics, Dynamics and Mechanics to students in the Civil, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Departments. In 1965 he was offered a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley his early work included the strain rate and yield point behavior of steel, the impact of projectiles on plates and viscoelastic media, the behavior of viscoplastic solids, and the basic mechanics and computer evaluation of automobile barrier systems.
While on sabbatical leave in 1971 and 1972 at the Physics and Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Lower Hutt, New Zealand he worked along with R. Ivan Skinner and A. J. Heine on the development of various types of hysteretic dampers to protect structures during earthquakes. These early dampers included metallic beams and plates yielding in flexure and torsion. This ground-breaking research involved not only the development and testing of various types of hysteretic dampers, but also the development of analytical models to predict their behavior. His paper, “Mechanisms of Energy Absorption in Special Devices for Use in Earthquake Resistant Structures,” published in 1972 in the Bulletin of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, is now recognized as one of the seminal technical papers in the field of energy dissipation devices for structures subjected to earthquakes and other types of dynamic loads.
By the mid-1970s he had become interested in the modification and adaptation of laminated rubber bearings—which until then had been used primarily to accommodate thermal and service loads in bridges, and also to mitigate train and subway vibrations in buildings—for the protection of structures from earthquake ground motions. He embarked upon an extensive period of experimental research utilizing the world’s first earthquake shaking table, newly constructed at UC Berkeley, to investigate the behavior of numerous seismically isolated structures as well as structures and non-structural systems with supplemental energy dissipation (damping) systems. In association with C.J. Derham and others from the Malaysian Rubber Producers Research Association (MRPRA, now known as the Tun Abdul Razak Research Centre) in Hertford, England, he extended and refined the design of laminated rubber bearings, and collaborated on the development of high-damping rubber for seismic isolation bearings. Together with his Ph.D. students, he designed and built several testing machines at UC Berkeley’s Earthquake Engineering Research Center (EERC) to test laminated rubber bearings subjected to combined axial and lateral loads, initiating formal research in what is now the large field of seismic isolation within earthquake engineering. Prof. Kelly served as the Director of EERC in 1987-88.
His collaboration with MRPRA led to the planning of an international conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1982, which was sponsored by the Malaysian Rubber Research and Development Board and organized by the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia. This was the first-ever conference to be devoted entirely to the topic of seismic protection for buildings and bridges using the concept of seismic isolation. The conference was co-sponsored by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and through their efforts, participants from 20 countries attended, exposing seismic isolation to a wide range of potential users in seismic areas of the world. In August 1989, Prof. Kelly hosted the First International Seminar on Seismic Base Isolation for Nuclear Power Facilities, one of a series of post-conference seminars following the 10th International Conference on Structural Mechanics in Reactor Technology (SMiRT-10) held in Anaheim, California. This notable gathering was the first in what was to become the World Conference on Seismic Isolation, Energy Dissipation and Active Vibration Control of Structures (WCSI), and the 19th such conference, 19WCSI, was recently held at UC Berkeley on 15-19 September 2025.
In the early 1980s, he proposed the use of seismic isolation with rubber bearings for the Foothill Communities Law and Justice Center (FCLJC) in Rancho Cucamonga located about 13 miles west of the San Andreas Fault. This building became one of the first seismically isolated buildings in the world, the first in the U.S., and the first worldwide to use high-damping rubber isolation bearings.
Prof. Kelly and C.J. (Des) Derham of MRPRA with FCLJC high-damping rubber bearing, 1984.
In the mid-1980s, together with a small group of practicing structural engineers, he played an integral part in the development of what was informally known as the “Yellow Book”, by the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, the first ever guidelines for the design of seismically isolated structures that provided the basis for the inclusion of this technology in seismic code provisions used today all around the world. In the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s Prof. Kelly was a consultant to the United Nations (UNIDO) and, together with MRPRA worked to develop seismic isolation for low-cost housing in developing countries and was instrumental in first-in-country projects in Armenia, Chile, China, India, and Indonesia where isolation was used for residential construction. His contributions to the international community included being the US delegate to the International Standards Organization (TC45 / SC4 / WG9) from 2002 to 2013 where he was a key contributor to the development of the ISO Standard 22762, the only recognized international standard for the design and testing of seismic isolation bearings.
On National Science Foundation Seismic Isolation Study Tour to Japan, May-June 1988.
While Prof. Kelly’s work in the field of seismic isolation has received most recognition over the years, he always maintained a parallel interest in supplemental energy dissipation to enhance the seismic performance of structures. This interest had its origins in his post-doctoral work in the 1960s and was firmly established during his sabbatical in New Zealand at the beginning of the ‘70s. An intensive period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s saw extensive experimental and theoretical research on viscoelastic, friction and shape memory alloy damping systems, much of the work using the UC Berkeley shake table and large-scale multistory building models, at the time being the largest and most extensive experiments of their kind.
Concerned that the increasing cost of seismic isolation bearings was impeding their wider use, in 1990s Prof. Kelly began exploring ways to facilitate the production of low-cost seismic isolation bearings by replacing the internal steel shim (reinforcing) plates in laminated rubber bearings with fiber reinforcement and eliminating the top and bottom thick steel end plates. Fiber materials are lighter weight but still have an in-plane elastic stiffness comparable to that of steel. Fiber reinforcement also allows a simpler, less labor-intensive manufacturing process that can reduce the overall manufacturing cost. His pioneering work in this area led to what are now known as fiber reinforced elastomeric isolators (FREIs). Beyond the projects in which FREIs have been implemented, this innovation inspired dozens of researchers worldwide to pursue FREIs and other low-cost device alternatives to expand the use of seismic isolation, establishing an enduring line of inquiry that continues to shape the field.
Prof. Kelly published 395 journal articles, reports, and papers in conference proceedings. He also authored or coauthored four books on seismic isolation and energy dissipation devices. The first, published in 1993 (and with a much enlarged second edition in 1997) was entitled Earthquake-Resistant Design with Rubber, the second in 1999, coauthored with Farzad Naeim, was entitled Design of Seismic Isolated Structures: From Theory to Practice and covered not only mechanical behavior of elastomeric rubber bearings and sliding bearings, but also simplified equations to design these elements and practical approaches to design seismically isolated structures. He published his third book, entitled Mechanics of Rubber Bearings for Seismic and Vibration Isolation, in 2011 with Dimitrios Konstantinidis, and his fourth, entitled Seismic Isolation - A Primer, in 2019 with Jiang Jun Lee.
In addition to being an outstanding scholar, Prof. Kelly also served as a consultant to many national and international seismic isolation projects in Chile, China, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, and Greece; as well as to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on seismic performance of equipment and piping systems in power plants; the General Electric Co. and Rockwell International on seismic isolation of liquid metal fast breeder nuclear power plants; and the Argonne National Laboratory on seismic isolation for nuclear facilities. These collaborations included experimental research investigating the effects of bearing end connection details on shear and stability behavior, low shape factor bearings for shear and vertical isolation, and extensive work on bearing limit states.
He received many awards and honors during his career, some of which included the George W. Housner Medal in 2008 and the Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2001 from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He was recognized as a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanics in 2001, and an Honorary President of the Romanian Association of Earthquake Engineering in 1993, when he was also awarded the Miller Research Professorship.
Prof. Kelly was an outstanding teacher and lecturer. He advised more than thirty doctoral students in their Ph.D. theses, many of whom went on to become university professors, researchers and practicing engineers worldwide. Many post-doctoral students and Fulbright Visiting Scholars spent time at UC Berkeley working with him. In 1991 at UC Berkeley he introduced the first university-level graduate course on seismic isolation and energy dissipation. He also taught many short courses and seminars on isolation and energy dissipation all over the world.
Prof. Kelly spreading the word. Bologna, Italy, 1993.
Prof. Kelly with former students and colleagues, (L-R), Eduardo Miranda, Nicos Makris, Ian Aiken, Dmitrios Konstantinidis and Masaru Kikuchi. Engineering Mechanics Institute Symposium, Stanford University, June 2015.
Prof. Kelly’s last classroom lecture at UC Berkeley, April 2019.
n his last public talk on the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebration of the UC Berkeley shake table at the Richmond Field Station in June 2022, Prof. Kelly recounted his entry into the field of earthquake engineering, his early projects in New Zealand and the US, and highlighted one of the key contributions of the shake table to the field. He pointed out that before the shake table, structural engineers saw the earthquake loading as a static process, and the advent of the shake table and the opportunity to observe in detail dynamic structural response made engineers realize that seismic loading is inherently dynamic – a realization that opened the doors for technologies that modify the dynamics of the problem such as isolation and energy dissipation.
Prof. Kelly at the 50th anniversary celebration of the UC Berkeley shake table, June 2022.
On September 17th 2025, just six days before his passing, many of his former students and collaborators, together with several hundred professors, researchers and practicing engineers from 34 different countries gathered to recognize him during the 19th World Conference on Seismic Isolation, Energy Dissipation and Active Vibration Control of Structures (19WCSI) that was held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. During a special session in his honor, in the conference series that he initiated, the current president of the Anti-Seismic Systems International Society (ASSISi) and Prof. Kelly’s former PhD student, Dr. Ian Aiken, announced the establishment by ASSISi of the James M. Kelly medal to be awarded in future years to individuals making outstanding contributions in the field of seismic isolation and seismic protective systems. This medal will carry forward the enormous legacy and impact of Professor James Marshall Kelly, who is considered the father of seismic isolation and supplemental energy for structures.
Prof. Kelly receiving the inaugural James M. Kelly Medal from the Anti-Seismic Systems International Society at 19WCSI, UC Berkeley, 17 September 2025.
Prof. Kelly was well known for his love of wine and British cars. He enjoyed a glass of wine at social gatherings and regaled people with his storytelling. He had a fleet of Rovers over the years and later drove a Mini into his late 80s. He combined his passion for isolation and wine in a famous isolated bridge shake table experiment in 1984 with wine glasses above and below the isolation plane to visually demonstrate the effectiveness of isolation, with the wine unspilled above the isolators. This brilliant demonstration, one that only Prof. Kelly could conceive, helped decision makers understand and relate to isolation in the most straight-forward of terms. As his students fondly recall, Prof. Kelly made difficult courses like solid mechanics fun to learn, and made the student life at the Richmond Field Station much more enjoyable thanks to his love of sharing stories over food and wine.
Jim, as his many friends referred to him, was married for 63 years to his beloved Celia, who died in November 2023. They had two daughters, Shona and Maggi, and raised them in Berkeley. He is survived by his daughter, Maggi, and son-in-law, Brian, of Berkeley, California, and his grandchildren, Shane and Alina.
Jim and Celia Kelly, April 1999.
(photo: Shakhzod Takhirov)
Contributors: Ian Aiken, Amarnath Kasalanati, Dimitrios Konstantinidis, Nicos Makris, Eduardo Miranda