Member: National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Foreign Member: Royal Society, London; Czech, Austrian, Italian (dei Lincei), Spanish, Japanese (EAJ), Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), Indian (INAE), and Greek (Academy of Athens) national academies; Lombard Institute, Academia Europaea (London), and European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Salzburg).

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; Medals 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 Society of Engineering Science (SES); Outstanding Research Award of Am. Soc. for Composites (ASC); L'Hermite Medal (RILEM); Exner Medal (Austria); Torroja Medal (Spain); Solin, Bažant (Sr.), CSM and Stodola Medals (Czech Rep., Slovakia), and others. Elected to NAE, NAS, AAAS, Roy Soc London and 7 other national academies; Guggenheim Fellow. Past President of SES, IA-FraMCoS (founder) and IA - ConCreep (founder). Past Editor-in-Chief of ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics. In 1955, he was the national winner of Mathematical Olympics of Czechoslovakia. 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) he came #1 in CE and #2 in all engineering worldwide (ditto Elsevier survey 2022). ASCE created ZP Bažant Medal for failure and damage prevention, ASCE created ZP Bažant Medal for contributions to mechanics, and CSM created ZP Bažant Prize for mechanics.

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.