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EERI 2025 Board of Directors Election

EERI is pleased to announce the candidates for Director for the 2025 Board of Directors Election. You can view the candidate bios and vision statements below.

All eligible EERI voting members will receive an email with a link to access their secure online ballot to cast their vote starting October 1, 2024. The election will close on November 1, 2024 at 11:59 pm Pacific Time.

DIRECTOR A:

Craig Davis (M. EERI, 1995)
Manager, C A Davis Engineering
Santa Clarita, California

Craig Davis PhotoCraig A. Davis, Ph.D., PE, GE is a professional consultant on geotechnical, earthquake and lifeline infrastructure system resilience engineering. During his 32-year career at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Water System (LADWP) he worked as the Departmental Chief Resilience Officer, Resilience Program Manager, Seismic Manager, Geotechnical Engineering Manager and Trunk Line Design Manager. Dr. Davis developed a comprehensive LA Water System resilience program. After retiring from the LADWP, Dr. Davis continues to consult and is involved in creating policy for improving infrastructure systems to threats and hazards. He is a California licensed Civil and Geotechnical Engineer and received a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Southern California. Dr. Davis participates in many national and international professional committees involved in geotechnical engineering and lifeline system resilience. He was honored with the ASCE 2016 Le Val Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction and 2020 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award. He received the EERI 2021 Distinguished Lecture Award for outstanding contributions to earthquake risk reduction. He was honored to be in the 2023 introductory class designated as ‘Pipeline Engineer – Water’ by the ASCE Utility Engineering and Survey Institute.

Craig’s vision:

I am interested in serving on the EERI board to help lead the organization into the future and improve the resilience of communities to earthquakes and other hazards. EERI has worldwide recognition and a long-standing tradition of excellence of advancing seismic risk reduction for buildings and infrastructure and promoting other preparedness measures to withstand and recover from large earthquakes. My 37 years working in the geotechnical and lifeline earthquake engineering fields has prepared me to help lead EERI. I have investigated many earthquakes around the world including in the USA, Japan, China, New Zealand, Turkey, and Italy and I have served as a Learning from Earthquakes executive committee member for 9 years. I worked for 32 years at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power serving as their earthquake expert and first Resilience Program Manager. I maintain a significant number of contacts internationally in the earthquake engineering field. I also have and continue to serve on many national and international committees of significance to making policy and driving improvements in many fields of practice needed to improve earthquake performance of infrastructure and society. These committees include the advisory committee to the NEHRP agencies, the recently created NIBS Lifeline Infrastructure Hub, National Academies Committee on Geotechnical and Geological Engineering. I am actively engaged in multiple engineering societies including over 30 years as an EERI member where I am currently serving as a Board member on the EERI Southern California Chapter. I am also an active member of the Seismological Society of America and the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division for which I helped create and served as the inaugural committee chairperson. I have performed practice-oriented research on geotechnical and lifeline earthquake engineering, published over 185 technical papers, and remain engaged with numerous university researchers around the world. I instigated the self-sustaining hazard resilient pipeline industry in the USA, which is further progressing around the world. This industry is developing a wide array of new pipeline technologies useful for improving the performance of underground pipelines when exposed to earthquakes and other geo-hazards for water, wastewater, and other types of pipeline networks. It involves engineering, testing, manufacturing, specialized construction practices, development of guidelines and standards, and many other aspects permeating current practice in lifeline earthquake engineering. I led the technical development of the first performance-based engineering process applicable to all lifeline infrastructure systems which is currently being applied to the design of these systems for functional recovery in the recent NIST publication titled Initial Framework to Design Lifeline Infrastructure for Post-Earthquake Functional Recovery (NIST SP 1310 and NIST SP 1311).

Shahram Pezeshk (M. EERI, 1989)
Chair and Professor of Civil Engineering, The University of Memphis
Memphis, Tennessee

Shahram Pezeshk PhotoShahram Pezeshk brings over 35 years of experience in earthquake engineering and engineering seismology. He currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Memphis and Director of its Center for Disaster Recovery and Resiliency. Throughout his career, Dr. Pezeshk has focused on understanding and applying engineering and seismological principles, conducting research, and developing models for seismic hazard assessments. His work includes developing ground motion models for various regions, focusing on the Central and Eastern United States, and contributing to numerous seismic hazard studies. His research has been published in leading journals in engineering and seismology, including EERI’s Earthquake Spectra.

Dr. Pezeshk has been a member of EERI since 1989 and is the current president of the EERI New Madrid chapter. He co-organized the 2012 EERI Annual Meeting in Memphis, Tennessee, and serves as the faculty advisor for the EERI student chapter at the University of Memphis. Additionally, Pezeshk is an ASCE Fellow, a board member of Tennessee Structural Engineers, and a licensed professional engineer in Tennessee.

Shahram’s vision:

Having dedicated 35 years to serving the Central United States community as a practicing engineer, a professor, a department chair, and the Director of the Center for Disaster Recovery and Resiliency, and collaborating with engineers, politicians, policymakers, emergency managers, geoscientists, and planners, I believe I bring a unique strength, talent, vision, and perspective to the EERI Board of Directors. If given the honor of serving on the board, I will fulfill EERI’s vision and mission to equip members with the technical knowledge, leadership and advocacy skills, collaborative networks, and multidisciplinary context necessary to achieve earthquake resilience in their communities worldwide.

My extensive experience has given me the essential background and knowledge to help EERI advance as a global leader. My primary goal as a board member will be to share my passion for EERI with others and encourage their involvement. I will strive to create new opportunities with researchers, practicing engineers, social scientists, and public advocates, particularly focusing on the Central and Eastern United States. Additionally, I will emphasize recruiting young members, building our student membership, and fostering relationships to help students transition into active EERI members after graduation.

DIRECTOR B:

Ezra Jampole (M. EERI, 2012)
Principal, Exponent
New York, New York

Ezra Jampole PhotoDr. Ezra Jampole is a Principal Engineer in Exponent’s civil and structural engineering practice, based in New York City. He specializes in evaluating the performance of structures subjected to extreme loads such as earthquakes, wind, and flood events and in performance-based analysis and risk assessments. He has served as a consultant on projects assessing the origin of damage and cause of collapse of structures following earthquakes, extreme weather events, adjacent construction incidents, corrosion and deterioration, settlement, and long-term issues. Dr. Jampole is experienced in expert witness investigations for international arbitration and domestic litigation cases and has given expert witness testimony for several large infrastructure disputes. He also has experience designing steel, concrete, and wood framed buildings; and in nonlinear analysis, finite element analysis, applied element analysis, probabilistic hazard analysis, incremental dynamic analysis, and earthquake ground motion selection. He has developed novel multi-disciplinary risk analysis models for the utilities industry aimed at reducing risk due to numerous hazards, including transmission towers subjected to earthquake-induced landslides, contact between conductors and foreign objects, arc-faulting, and contamination-induced insulator flashover.

Dr. Jampole has published in the areas of seismic isolation, risk and hazard analysis, and high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites, and has lectured extensively on these topics. He serves as an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University and teaches a graduate course on Forensic Structural Engineering, and previously served as an adjunct professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he taught a graduate course on structural dynamics. He holds a B.Sc. in civil engineering from Northeastern University and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Jampole has been extensively involved in EERI for over a decade. As a graduate student, he was a member of the Student Leadership Council (SLC) for three years, including serving as co-President, and pioneered the post-earthquake reconnaissance workshop that has become a fixture of annual meetings and a direct link from undergraduate seismic design competition participants to professionals within EERI. He was an active member of the Younger Members Committee (YMC), serving as co-chair for two years. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he started virtual programming to keep younger members engaged in EERI, including an e-Meet-the-Leaders series and lightning presentations on the Oral History series. He also advocated for younger members to be given opportunities to disseminate their cutting-edge research in webinars. He participated as a lecturer in the Friedman Family Visiting Professionals Program, which gave him the opportunity to visit numerous universities across North America and learn from and give guidance to student chapters and faculty. Recently, he has served on the Honors Committee and Professional Development committee. Dr. Jampole was a recipient of the inaugural Younger Member Award from EERI in 2018. Dr. Jampole has participated in numerous post-earthquake reconnaissance activities, including as a member of the EERI teams following the Cushing, Oklahoma (2016), Mexico City (2017), and Türkiye and Syria (2023) earthquakes. He also participated in the 2019 EERI Travel Study Program to New Zealand, which provided an eye-opening experience on cross-discipline collaboration and long-term recovery.

Ezra’s vision:

I am honored to be considered for the Board of Directors of EERI, an organization that has contributed significantly to my professional development and career. I envision strengthening the impacts of EERI’s reconnaissance efforts, recruiting and training the next generation of earthquake engineers, scientists, and policy-makers, fostering community though in-person engagement, and ensuring EERI is at the forefront of emerging technologies.

I believe that EERI should strengthen reconnaissance teams by placing a particular emphasis on training the next generation of earthquake engineers. Additionally, EERI should foster collaborations with other organizations as a key component of advancing multi-disciplinary research efforts, while maintaining efforts by structural and geotechnical engineers to learn from failures. Additionally, I would like to push reconnaissance teams to publish more lessons learned and monitor long-term changes in policy and construction techniques, oversite, and engineering in affected regions as part of responsibilities of reconnaissance teams to derive maximal benefit from the significant capital that is required for field reconnaissance.

I am a firm believer in the value of in-person events, which build community, and allow for students to engage with professionals. I plan to encourage in-person events, including the annual meeting, as well as regional seminars and trainings. These are critical for retention and building a strong pipeline for the SLC, YMC, and seasoned professionals. We should encourage diversity, equity, and inclusivity in our activities, spanning from committee assignments to speakers. Geographic diversity is also important, and we should encourage more engagement of less-active EERI regions in the US and abroad.

Finally, I believe that EERI should be at the forefront of new technology and engineering techniques to serve our members and the profession. This can partially be fulfilled through seminars organized by the professional development committee, but workshops and potentially a new committee devoted to innovation would also foster collaborations and joint-learning. I am tremendously excited for the future of EERI and look forward to serving the earthquake community as a member of the Board of Directors.

Lindsey Maclise (M. EERI, 2011)

Principal, Forell | Elsesser Engineers
San Francisco, California

Lindsey Maclise PhotoLindsey has been actively engaged with EERI since 2012, joining the institute the year prior to being honored for selection as a Housner Fellow with the inaugural class. In addition to being selected into the Housner Fellows program, Lindsey was the Chair of the 2016 EERI Convention, has represented EERI as a Friedman Family Visiting Professional at various Universities and taken on the role of chairing the Housner selection committee. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from UC Berkeley, where she is currently serving as the chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Advisory Board.

Lindsey is a Principal Structural Engineer at Forell | Elsesser Engineers in San Francisco where she leads the company’s Carbon Neutral Initiative. Lindsey recently completed a Board term serving the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC) and has participated on other local non-profit industry boards, an experience which she will leverage if elected to the EERI Board.

Lindsey’s vision:

I have been involved with EERI for over a decade and during that time have continually grown to respect, admire, and be inspired by everything that EERI provides to the earthquake engineering community. While I have been interested in the opportunity to serve on the EERI Board for many years, it was my recent experience on the EERI strategic planning panels that spurred my interest in joining the Board at this time. Through the discussions, I became more deeply engaged and enthusiastic about contributing to the future of EERI and its mission. In 2012, EERI selected me to be part of the inaugural cohort of Housner Fellows, which proved to be a career changing opportunity. The Housner Fellows program provided a unique opportunity for me to focus on leadership, team integration, and the core values of EERI. I am eternally grateful to EERI and Lucy Arendt for developing and administering the Housner Fellow’s program and their dedication to its success. After my term ended, I continued to lead the selection process for the Housner program for many years.

More recently, I stepped back from leadership involvement in EERI as I was serving on the Board for the Structural Engineering Association of Northern California. While I missed having a direct role in EERI during this time, I believe this demonstrates my commitment to the Board that I am serving and intentionality in the role. My time on the SEAONC board has also helped me strengthen my understanding of Board governance and the role of individual members to support the direction of the organization in a positive way.

My vision for EERI remains rooted in its profound impact as the leading resource for the earthquake engineering community. My primary ambition will be to work on connecting the various student chapters and solidifying their transition into full EERI. For the past two years I have participated as an EERI Friedman Family Visiting Professional and enjoyed my interaction with the students. Every time I attend the EERI Annual Meeting I am amazed at the enthusiasm our students have for the Seismic Design Competition. I have enjoyed acting as a judge on multiple occasions and have witnessed the dedication the students have for our profession. I believe that stronger integration of the student chapters, and harnessing their energy, is a key growth opportunity for EERI in the coming years for sustained longevity of the Institute. I look forward to serving EERI in the coming years and hope that you will consider me for this position.

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