Recent advances in EERI’s Learning From Earthquakes program

Synopsis

The earthquake reconnaissance landscape in the United States has evolved significantly over the past 10-15 years. This presentation will discuss recent contributions of EERI’s Learning From Earthquake (LFE) program within this new landscape, including a stakeholder workshop on organizing post-earthquake reconnaissance to optimize impact at 12NCEE in Salt Lake City and the multi-phase, interdisciplinary deployments to Türkiye following the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake sequence. The presentation will also highlight future priorities and initiatives for the LFE program.

About the speakers

Ayse Hortacsu is Director of Projects at the Applied Technology Council (ATC), a non-profit structural engineering organization headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over her 18 years at ATC, she has managed projects on various structural engineering issues that have resulted in 60 publications to date, including a report to the 115th United States Congress on post-disaster building safety evaluation guidance (FEMA P-2055). Her projects have earned Excellence in Structural Engineering awards from the Structural Engineers Association of California (SEAOC) and have led to preparation of seismic mitigation policy in the U.S. and abroad. She is currently serving as a co-chair of the Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) program of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and has conducted post-earthquake field reconnaissance after Turkey-Syria (2023), Nepal (2015), Napa California (2014), Haiti (2010), and Izmit, Turkey (1999) earthquakes. She has served as a Director for EERI and the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC). Ayse is also the founder of Women in Structural Engineering and a founding member of the Structural Engineering Equity and Engagement (SE3) Committee of SEAONC.

Dr Mike Mieler is an Associate at Arup in the Risk and Resilience team in San Francisco with over 10 years of experience in climate and resilience projects in the built environment. His work focuses on assessing and mitigating the impacts of earthquakes and other natural hazards on complex societal infrastructure systems, including university campuses and networks of datacenters. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2012, where he developed a performance-based engineering framework for linking broad, community-level resilience goals to specific performance objectives for individual buildings and lifelines. He recently served as the co-chair of EERI’s “Learning From Earthquakes” program from 2021-2025, and has participated in numerous earthquake reconnaissance field studies, including leading multi-disciplinary teams to investigate the resilience and recovery of impacted communities following the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake Sequence, the 2018 Anchorage Earthquake, and the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake.       

Join online

The event will be online only. The link to attend the meeting online on Teams will be provided as soon as this is available.

Further information

The event is organised by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and co-badged with the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) and SECED. The event is open to all and is free to attend.