Loukas F. Kallivokas was born in Athens, Hellas. He completed secondary education at the French-Hellenic high school Lycée Léonin, and then entered the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) , where he graduated with a Diploma in Civil Engineering. At NTUA, his Diploma Thesis research on boundary elements was supervised by professor John Katsikadelis. Following graduation, he completed his military service in the Hellenic Navy (Hydrographic Service), and then joined the Department of Civil Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering (1990), and a PhD in Computational Mechanics (1995), under the supervision of professor Jacobo Bielak. In his MS thesis, he developed local absorbing boundaries for acoustics, and in his PhD thesis he presented a numerical solution for transient fluid-structure interaction problems involving scatterers embedded in unbounded acoustic domains.

After completing his PhD, he held a joint postdoctoral appointment between the Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery Laboratory at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and a biomechanics laboratory at the Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, where he worked on simulations of orthopaedic biomechanical problems. In 1995, he was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for research in the large-scale simulation of seismic motion, for which he worked with professors Bielak and Ghattas at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1998, he was a co-recipient of the Allen Newell Medal for research excellence in the modeling of seismic motion. Loukas also held appointments as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering (1995-1997), and later as a visiting scientist in the School of Computer Science (1998-1999), both at Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1999, Loukas joined the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin as an assistant professor. In 2003 he was the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award for research in full-waveform-driven site characterization. He is currently a professor and the holder of the Brunswick-Abernathy Regents Professorship in Soil Dynamics and Geotechnical Engineering. His research interests are in computational engineering and sciences, with particular emphasis on wave mechanics and inverse problems. Application areas of interest include metamaterials design, subsurface imaging and site characterization, seismic motion and wave propagation modeling, soil- and fluid-structure interaction problems and non-destructive condition assessment of natural and engineered systems. His most recent work focuses on wave-driven inverse medium, inverse scattering, and inverse source problems. He is a member of various professional and scientific organizations, including AAM, ASCE, SIAM, USACM, and HSTAM. From 2008 to 2011 he was the chair of the Computational Mechanics Committee of ASCE's Engineering Mechanics Institute, and he currently serves as an Associate Editor for ASCE's Journal of Engineering Mechanics.