Elena Sossenkina, P.E.

Based in our Denver office, Elena leads our levees practice. She specializes in risk assessment and risk-informed decision-making for dam and levee safety projects. Her expertise spans portfolio risk management, estimation of risk and uncertainty, risk facilitation, and geotechnical investigations of complex sites. 

Elena has provided support to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Bureau of Reclamation, California Department of Water Resources, Tennessee Valley Authority, and National Park Service, as well as several non-governmental clients. Recently, she served as an advisor to the USACE, contributing to the development of National Levee Safety Guidelines and initiatives related to national levee inventory and review. She led four pilot projects to test scalable risk assessment methodologies for non-federal levees, followed by the creation of standard operating procedures and industry training.

She serves on the United States Society on Dams (USSD) Board of Directors and is Vice Chair of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) Technical Committee on Levees. She is a past Chair of the U.S. Levee Safety Coalition, a partnership of six professional organizations dedicated to advancing levee safety in the United States. 

Elena has organized levee workshops for USSD and the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO), and led preparation of the U.S. chapter for the ICOLD report on the state of levees worldwide. She co-authored the 2017 guidelines on Instrumentation and Measurements for Monitoring Dam Performance for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), served as a reviewer for the International Levee Handbook and managed its 12-month rollout campaign in the U.S. Supported by various professional organizations in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and USACE, this campaign included webinars, publications and information workshops featuring 20 technical technical webinars attended by 1,700 participants from 11 countries.