In July 2024, researchers from the U.S. and Japan renewed their formal memorandum of cooperation to work together on research that will mitigate infrastructure damage from natural hazards and in particular earthquakes using NHERI and E-Defense facilities.

This fruitful, long-term research partnership involves the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI), funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) E-Defense facility, funded by the Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT).

Representatives from NHERI and NIED signed a 5-year agreement that will enable American and Japanese researchers to share facilities and data and to engage in collaborative education and outreach activities.

NIED experimental facilities include the three-dimensional, full-scale earthquake testing facility nicknamed "E-Defense," located in Miki City Japan. NSF-funded NHERI facilities include its twelve components.

The agreement is a follow-on from two previous U.S.-Japan earthquake engineering partnerships, one in with NHERI 2017 and one with the NSF-funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) in 2004.

Read more about the NHERI/NIED partnership.

Large-scale experiment on E-Defense shake table: Test #2, Tokyo Metropolitan Resilience Project — Reinforced Concrete Structure, PI: Prof. Kusunoki. During the first phase of the NHERI-NIED/E-Defense collaboration, Dec. 2019. (Image source: NHERI-NCO)