The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and the Seismological Society of America (SSA) are pleased to announce that Jack Baker (M.EERI 2004), professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, is the 2023 recipient of the William B. Joyner Lecture Award. Baker will deliver the Joyner Lecture at the EERI Annual Meeting to be held in the San Francisco Bay Area in spring 2023 and the 2023 SSA Annual Meeting to be held 17-20 April 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The lectureship is jointly awarded by EERI and SSA to those who have provided outstanding earth science contributions to the theory and practice of earthquake engineering or outstanding earthquake engineering contributions to the direction and focus of earth science research—together with demonstrated skills of communication at the interface of earthquake science and earthquake engineering. The lecture honors the distinguished career of William B. Joyner at the U.S. Geological Survey and his abiding commitment to continuing communication and education at the interface between research findings of earthquake science and the practical realities of earthquake engineering.
Baker’s research is at the forefront of the interface between earthquake seismology and earthquake engineering, focusing on the use of probabilistic and statistical tools for modeling of extreme loads on structures. At Stanford, he has worked on projects involving risk to spatially distributed systems, earthquake ground motion characterization, and predictions of soil failure from earthquakes, among other topics.
He is the director of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative, which applies engineering analyses to social impact and human behavior in the context of disasters and extreme events. Baker also has industry experience in seismic hazard assessment, construction management, and modeling of catastrophic losses for insurance companies, in part as co-founder of Haselton Baker Risk Group.
Baker has served as an Associate Editor for both SSA’s Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America and EERI’s Earthquake Spectra. He has been Editor of Earthquake Spectra since 2018. He has been awarded both EERI's Shah Family Innovation Prize and Earthquake Spectra’s Outstanding Paper Award.
His recent textbook, Seismic Hazard and Risk Analysis, was named a PROSE Awards finalist by the Association of American Publishers in 2022. Other honors include the Helmut Krawinkler Award in 2019 from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the 2018 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineering.
Baker’s Joyner lecture will focus on spatial correlations in ground shaking, exploring the measurement of correlations from seismological data, and the impacts of these correlations on risk to distributed infrastructure systems. Prospects for further learning from numerical ground motion simulations, and for improving the resilience of the built environment through these insights, will also be discussed.
For more information about the Joyner Lecture Award, visit the EERI Awards page here or the SSA website here.
