9 honorary doctorates: CTU Prague, Karlsruhe, UC Boulder; Milano Politechnic, INSA Lyon; TU Wien, Ohio State, U. of Minnesota, UPPA France. Honorary member of ASCE, ASME, American Concrete Institute (ACI), Int. Union of Res. Lab's in Material and Structures (RILEM, Paris), and CSM, CSCE and CCS Prague.

Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art I. Class, from pres. of Austria; ASME Medal; Timoshenko, Nadai & Warner Medals of American Society of Mechanical Engineers; von Karman, Freudenthal, Newmark, Biot, Mindlin and Croes Medals, and Huber, Lifetime Achievement and TY Lin Awards from American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE); A.J. Boase Award (ACI); Prager Medal of Soc. of Engineering Science (SES); Murray Medal and Lecture of the Soc. of Exper. Mech. (SEM); Outstanding Research Award of Am. Soc. for Composites (ASC); L'Hermite Medal (RILEM); Exner Medal (Austria); Torroja Medal (Spain); Solin, Bazant (Sr.), CSM and Stodola Medals (Czech Rep., Slovakia), and others. Guggenheim Fellow. In 1955, he was the national winner of Mathematical Olympics of Czechoslovakia.

Elected to: NAE, NAS, AAAS, Roy. Soc. London, Roy. Soc. Canada, national academies of Austria, Japan, Spain, Czech Rep., Italy (Lincei), Greece (Athens); Can. AE, Eur. Acad, of Sci., EASA, Lombard Acad., and Turin Acad. ASCE created ZP Bazant Medal for failure and damage prevention, ASCE created ZP Bazant Medal for contributions to mechanics, and CSM Prague created ZP Bazant Prize for mechanics. In a 2019 Stanford University citation survey of >250,000 engineering authors (weighted for first and last author and number of co-authors, and filtered for self-citations, reciprocal citations and citation farms, see PLoS 2019) he came #1 in CE and #2 in all engineering worldwide. Ditto similar Elsevier survey 2022.

Past President of SES, of IA-FraMCoS (founder) and of IA-ConCreep (founder). Past Editor-in-Chief of ASCE Journal of Engrg. Mechanics. In 1955, he was the national winner of Mathematical Olympics of Czechoslovakia. Skiers might note that his 1959 patent of safety ski binding, mass produced in Czechoslovakia, is exhibited in New England Ski Museum, Franconia, NH.

Illinois Registered Structural Engineer (S.E.), since 1971

Mechanics of materials and structures, structural design and safety, with emphasis on the mechanics of fracture, damage and creep, structural stability, finite strain, size effects and scaling, probabilistic mechanics, nano-mechanics, diffusion with hygrothermal and chemo-mechanical effects, big data analysis and optimization; with applications to concrete, fiber composites, architected materials, tough ceramics, rocks, gas shale, soils, thin films, bone, snow and sea ice, and with impact on structural engineering, composite structures, structural safety, fracking and deep CO2 sequestration.