Media Room

Matt DeJong, UC Berkeley, is principal investigator and co-director of the NHERI SimCenter. DeJong’s earthquake engineering research focuses on monitoring and computational modeling of buildings and civil infrastructure.

Email: dejong@berkeley.edu

Greg Deierlein, Stanford University, is co-principal investigator and co-director of the NHERI SimCenter. Deierlein’s earthquake engineering research includes performance-based seismic design and risk assessment of buildings, bridges, and other structures.

Email: ggd@stanford.edu

Andre Barbosa, Oregon State University, is an authority on performance-based earthquake engineering, large-scale shake-table testing, nonlinear structural analysis, structural reliability and risk analysis, structural dynamics, multi-hazard loss estimation, assessment of robustness and resilient design of building and bridge structures (reinforced concrete, steel, and timber), high-throughput computing, and virtual reality modeling of engineering structures.

Email: andre.barbosa@oregonstate.edu
Phone: 541-737-7291

Dan Cox, Oregon State University, is principal investigator for NHERI at OSU experimental facility, located at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. Cox is an authority on community resilience to coastal hazards, including tsunami and hurricane surge and waves inundation in the built and natural environments. He conducts research on tsunami and wave impacts on near-coast structures, tsunami evacuation and life safety, sediment transport and erosion, and nature-based solutions for coastal hazards mitigation.

Email: dan.cox@oregonstate.edu
Phone: 541-737-3631

Tara Hutchinson, UC San Diego, is principal investigator of the NHERI Cold-Formed Steel program, which will test a ten-story CFS structure on the NHERI UC San Diego shake table in 2025. Hutchinson is an authority on earthquake and geotechnical engineering, performance assessment of structural and nonstructural components, and machine learning and computer vision methods for damage estimation.

Email: tahutchinson@ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-534-7436

Shiling Pei, Colorado School of Mines, led the NSF NHERI Tallwood project to examine resiliency and sustainability of tall wooden structures, which features the world’s tallest full-scale building ever tested on a shake table. Pei has expertise in large-scale shake-table testing, hazard mitigation and resilient infrastructure systems, and mass timber systems.  

Email: spei@mines.edu
Phone: 303-273-3932
X: @slpei

Julio Ramirez, Purdue University, is principal investigator for the NHERI Network Coordination Office. An earthquake engineer, his research centers on structural analysis and design of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures, with emphasis on seismic performance of concrete buildings and infrastructure, structural models and experimental methods, and design codes for structural concrete. He is an authority on earthquake hazard mitigation and seismic evaluation of existing bridges.

Email: ramirez@purdue.edu
Phone: 765-430-7853

Claudia Reis, Lehigh University, is co-principal investigator of the NHERI Lehigh experimental facility. Reis has expertise in the dynamics of critical infrastructure systems exposed to natural multi-hazards. Her work focuses on fluid-soil-structure interactions in the framework of coastal and offshore engineering and multi-risk management. She is conducting research on multi-scale and multi-physics domains to characterize loading patterns derived from multi-hazard prone regions and model the behavior of critical infrastructure due to extreme scenarios, such as cascading earthquake and tsunami events.

Email: claudia.reis@lehigh.edu

James Ricles, Lehigh University, is the principal investigator of the NHERI at Lehigh experimental facility and the director of the ATLSS Engineering Research Center. The NHERI Lehigh EF conducts physical and cyber-physical performance testing on civil, coastal, and offshore infrastructure. Ricles specializes in seismic-resistant steel structures, composite steel-concrete structures, and structural steel connections. His expertise also includes advanced simulation methods, such as large-scale, multi-directional, real-time multi-physics cyber-physical simulation of structural systems under dynamic loading; rehabilitation and assessment of damaged and deteriorated buildings, bridges, and offshore structures; offshore wind turbine structures subject to coupled aeroelastic, hydrodynamic, and mechanical loading effects; and resilience of coastal civil infrastructure.

Email: jmr5@lehigh.edu
Phone: 610-758-6252

Brady Cox, Utah State University, is affiliated with the NHERI at University of Texas large mobile shaker truck experimental facility. Cox specializes in geotechnical engineering, with emphasis on seismic design and in-situ site characterization for major construction projects. His research efforts combine experimental field testing with computational analyses and high-performance computing for subsurface imaging purposes. He has led teams deployed to collect seismic site characterization data at ground motion recording stations, soil liquefaction sites, and structural failures following significant earthquakes in the U.S. and around the world (e.g., Ecuador, Haiti, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Turkey). He has also participated in numerous dynamic site characterization projects for the seismic design of critical facilities (e.g., nuclear power plants, U.S. DOE laboratory sites, bridges, tunnels) in the U.S. and abroad.

Email: brady.cox@usu.edu
Phone: 435-797-0992

Jason DeJong, UC Davis, is principal investigator for NHERI at UC Davis experimental facility based at the Center for Geotechnical Modeling. DeJong is an authority on centrifuge testing modeling, soil and site characterization, liquefaction, bio-mediated and bio-inspired geotechnics, earthquake engineering, and geotechnical sustainability. 

Email: jdejong@ucdavis.edu
Phone: 530-754-8995

Ellen Rathje, University of Texas, Austin, is principal investigator for the NHERI DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, a public platform enabling natural hazards engineers to leverage data and computational approaches to improve resiliency from natural disasters, such as earthquakes. Her research areas of expertise include seismic slope stability and landslides, ground response analysis, and induced seismicity.  She is an authority on natural hazards data collection, data curation, and data re-use.

Email: e.rathje@mail.utexas.edu
Phone: 512-232-3683

Joe Wartman is principal investigator for the NHERI Natural Hazards reconnaissance facility, also known as the RAPID. Based at the University of Washington, the RAPID facility provides investigators with equipment, software and support services needed to collect, process and analyze perishable data from natural hazard events, including earthquakes. Wartman specializes in geological hazards with a specific interest in landslides and their impacts on communities. Over the past two decades, he has investigated and analyzed major geologic hazard events worldwide, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and landslides.

Email: uwrapid@uw.edu
Phone: 206-616-3318

Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association

NSF funding enables GEER to formalize post-disaster geotechnical engineering reconnaissance efforts. GEER is a volunteer organization of geotechnical engineers, engineering geologists, and earth scientists from academia, industry, government organizations, and non-profit organizations. GEER reconnaissance teams respond to earthquakes and other geotechnical extreme events, conducting detailed reconnaissance and documenting our observations.

David Frost, Georgia Tech, GEER principal investigator
Email: david.frost@ce.gatech.edu
Phone: 912-339-0196

Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network 

After extreme events such as earthquakes, the NSF-funded StEER network has a mandate to collect perishable data swiftly and systematically in order to inform the natural hazards research community's continued study of a disaster. StEER builds societal resilience by generating new knowledge on the performance of the built environment through impactful post-disaster reconnaissance disseminated to affected communities.

Khalid Mosalam, UC Berkeley, StEER associate director for earthquake hazards
Email: mosalam@berkeley.edu
Phone: (510) 375-9271

Tracy Kijewski-Correa, Notre Dame University, StEER principal investigator
Email: tkijewsk@nd.edu
Phone:  574-220-3679