EERI is delighted to announce that Dr. Charles A. Kircher (M.EERI 1974) has been awarded the 2025 George W. Housner Medal in recognition of his significant contributions to earthquake engineering. His contributions have included innovative developments in loss estimation, building code hazard mapping, standardization of building code design coefficients, and base isolation. This work has made lasting improvements to seismic safety.
A longstanding member of EERI, Dr. Kircher has served as Chair of the Seismic Risk Committee (1996 – 2007), Chair of the Technical Seminars Committee (1998 – 1999), and on the Editorial Board of Earthquake Spectra (1996 – 2001), including Co-Editor of special edition Seismic Design Provisions and Guidelines (2000). At the 100th Anniversary Earthquake Conference in 2006, he gave the invited presentation of the EERI-sponsored study When the Big One Strikes Again – Expected Losses due to a Repeat of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (Earthquake Spectra Outstanding Paper of 2006).
Dr. Kircher has worked on improving seismic design codes for most of his 47-year career. Prior to starting his own firm in 1991, he was a founding principal of Jack Benjamin and Associates. He holds B.S., M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the Structural Engineers Association of California (SEAOC) and an Honorary Member of the Northern Section of SEAOC. Dr. Kircher was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 “for advancing structural engineering practice in earthquake engineering and loss prevention in buildings.”
Dr. Kircher is a long-standing contributor to seismic code development committees of SEAOC, the Building Seismic Safety Council (BSSC) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). In 1986, SEAOC published the “Yellow Book,” the first comprehensive design provisions for isolated structures, written primarily by Dr. Kircher. In the early nineties, he developed an innovative method for estimating seismic losses in structures for use in HAZUS, FEMA’s standardized seismic loss estimating system. This method allows consideration of much more specific building characteristics than previously used methods that were dependent of field collected loss data. This method is still used in HAZUS today and also has been used to calibrate FEMA’s Rapid Visual Screening and Inventory Collection Module, and to develop risk scores used by the state of California to set priorities for retrofit of California hospitals.
His most significant contribution nationally was serving on Project 97, a national FEMA-funded project to develop code seismic hazard maps for design. In 1994, the NHERP Provisions committee was unable to achieve consensus on seismic design maps based on USGS seismic hazard maps, primarily due to very high near-fault hazard. Dr. Kircher developed a system that was adopted in codes in 1997 and was reaffirmed in major updates in 2007 and 2017. Dr. Kircher was also the Project Technical Director for ATC 63, “Quantification of Building Performance and Response Parameters,” which developed a methodology widely used to qualify several new structural systems and for research of traditional code systems.