Gregory Deierlein

John A. Blume Professor in the School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

From Performance-Based Engineering to Urban Resilience

Thursday, November 19– 4:30 pm

Greg Deierlein is a Professor and Director of the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford University, co-director of the NSF supported SimCenter of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI), and former Deputy Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center.  Deierlein specializes in the seismic design and behavior of structures, computational simulation of buildings and civil infrastructure, and performance-based engineering.  He has led major collaborative teams, involving researchers from the U.S., Japan, and Taiwan to develop and test innovative composite steel-concrete frame systems, self-centering braced frame systems, and light-frame residential construction.  He is active in the development of building code standards and policies to promote seismic resilience, including work with the Applied Technology Council (ATC), the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI).  He serves on the Specification Committee of the AISC, the Board of Directors of EERI, the national Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazard Reduction, and the Board of Trustees of GeoHazards International. Deierlein’s research and professional activities have been recognized through and AISC Lifetime Achievement Award, an Engineering News Record top newsmaker award, and several awards from ASCE including three Norman Medals, a Walter Huber Research Prize, two State-of-the Art awards, and others. He is a registered professional engineer, member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and Distinguished Member of ASCE.

From Performance-Based Engineering to Urban Resilience.  Performance-based earthquake engineering has matured over the past twenty years from a conceptual framework into a formal methodology that can enable quantitative assessment of the seismic risks to buildings and infrastructure.  Enabled by advanced computational technologies, performance-based methods provide for more transparent design and decision making that takes advantage of the latest research in characterizing earthquake ground motion hazards, simulating structural behavior, and assessing earthquake damage and its consequences. Performance-based approaches are facilitating the design of innovative structures and influencing building code requirements and public policies for earthquake safety. Continued developments to extend performance-based engineering to city-scale simulations provide emerging opportunities to engage urban planners, public officials, and other stakeholders in developing strategies to avoid and mitigate risks and improve resilience to earthquakes and other natural hazards.  Examples include new technologies to enable high-resolution earthquake scenario studies and earthquake policy initiatives in San Francisco and Los Angeles.