Pulse

News of the Institute

13NCEE Sponsor and Exhibitor Opportunities

The 13NCEE will be the perfect venue to showcase your company among the leading firms and organizations in the earthquake engineering and mitigation communities! Learn more about 13NCEE sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities at the conference website or contact ncee@eeri.org for more information.

13NCEE Papers Due Today!

The grace period for 13NCEE paper submissions ends at 11:59 PM tonight! Visit the Call for Papers page here to review requirements for paper formatting, the submission process, and paper submission fees.

We are aware some paper submitters are affected by the current U.S. government shutdown. We will work to ensure anyone who is furloughed or otherwise unable to submit their paper by the deadline due to the shutdown can complete their paper submissions in a reasonable time frame after the shutdown ends. If you are in this group, please complete this short form to alert us, and we will contact you with instructions once the shutdown ends.

Friedman Family Visiting Professionals: 2025 Highlights

EERI’s Friedman Family Visiting Professionals (FFVP) program brings professionals in the earthquake engineering and risk reduction field to visit universities. The 2024-2025 FFVP program included 21 professionals, who took part in 25 campus visits hosted by EERI student chapters from February to July 2025. Two more visits will take place this fall.

In 2025, 750 attendees have participated in the FFVP campus visit events so far, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and occasionally local practitioners. All student chapters rated the quality of content and interaction with their visiting professional a 4 or 5 out of 5. The student chapters’ evaluations highlight how the program fosters understanding and communication between and among practitioners, students, and scholars:

“The casual setting allowed for everyone to introduce themselves, connect, and speak freely about academic, professional, and social topics.”
The visiting professional’s “extensive real-world experience brought a practical and policy-relevant dimension to the topic that deeply resonated with our chapter.”
“This year’s FFVP presentation was informative, engaging, and highly technical—drawing a full audience that remained attentive throughout.”
“Overall, this year’s event maintained the high standard of FFVP yearly events, exceeding everyone’s expectations.”
“Students praised the session as ‘inspiring,’ valuing both the technical depth and [the speaker’s] frank career guidance.”
“The chapter most enjoys the honest conversations with the speaker about different career paths.”
“The chapter especially enjoyed the interactive discussions, where students asked questions about international project work, career development, and how to align personal interests with impactful engineering roles.”
“More than just a lecture, the experience served as a call to action that renewed our motivation to keep learning, connecting, and contributing to a safer and more prepared built environment.”

Student chapter applications to host a visit for the 2025-2026 FFVP program will open soon.

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Learning From Earthquakes

LFE Travel Study Explores Mexico’s 40-Year Journey Toward Earthquake Resilience

From September 14 to 20, 2025, in partnership with the Sociedad Mexicana de Ingeniería Sísmica (SMIS), EERI led its third Learning From Earthquakes Travel Study (LFE-TS) program, this time in Mexico. During the week-long LFE-TS program, 24 early-career professionals and graduate students attended lectures by distinguished local and international experts; met with professionals, community members, nonprofits, and government agencies; visited sites impacted by previous Mexico earthquakes; and participated in the semi-annual national earthquake early warning drill. Throughout the week, participants examined how risk reduction, response, and recovery have evolved in the 40 years since the 1985 Mexico earthquake. Program activities centered on five themes: Early Warning, Preparedness and Response; Building Codes and Construction; Site Effects; Building Retrofit, Innovative Systems and School Safety; and Cultural and Historic Structures. LFE-TS participants shared their observations and conclusions with an audience of approximately 150 people at the SMIS-sponsored Symposium on 40 Years Since the 1985 Mexico Earthquake.

Highlights of the trip included meeting with the Archbishop of Puebla to discuss the social consequences of damage to churches in his diocese, descending into the foundation of the Catedral Metropolitana to investigate solutions to differential settlement, visiting Mexico City’s central command and communication center for emergencies (C5), and listening to fellow participants deliver high-quality presentations at the SMIS-sponsored symposium commemorating the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. One participant said, “One of my favorite moments from the trip was visiting the Catedral Metropolitana de México. Seeing such an iconic structure up close and learning about the engineering challenges of preserving it in a highly seismic region was fascinating. It beautifully illustrated how history, architecture, and structural engineering intersect in the context of seismic resilience.”

The program was made possible by support from the EERI Learning From Earthquakes Endowment Fund, SMIS, and the 2025 trip’s Anchor Sponsor, Computers and Structures, Inc.(CSI). For the full report and more great photos, see the news post on the EERI website here.

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Webinars

Spectra August Issue Highlights

November 19, 2025

11:00 AM-12:00 PM Pacific Time

REGISTER HERE

Join us for the latest in this EERI webinar series showcasing papers of interest from each new issue of Earthquake Spectra! This webinar will feature two papers from the August 2025 issue: "Effectiveness of California Earthquake Scenarios in Motivating Mitigation," by Janise Rodgers, and “Rethinking resilience policy and practice,” by Mary Comerio. The lead authors will present their papers and respond to questions from participants.

Speakers:

Dr. Janise Rodgers (PE) is an earthquake engineer whose expertise includes not only the behavior of buildings during earthquakes but also technology transfer and capacity building, experimental and computational research, technical document development, and projects to help make communities safer from multiple natural hazards. Dr. Rodgers is GeoHazards International’s Chief Operating Officer and has managed international projects for GHI since 2005.
Dr. Mary C. Comerio, an internationally recognized expert on disaster recovery, is professor emerita in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. An EERI past president, honorary member, and Distinguished Lecturer, she received the Housner Medal, EERI’s highest honor, in 2022.

Earthquake Damage Assessment and Repair for Houses: The ATC-143 Methodology

November 6, 2025

12:00-1:00 PM Pacific Time

REGISTER HERE

Historically, wood-frame residential buildings have performed well during earthquakes. Wood as a material is light and flexible, and typical residential framing systems incorporate significant redundancy. Due to the prevalence of these buildings in earthquake-prone California, there has been ample opportunity to identify vulnerabilities and understand damage mechanisms associated with their structural systems. ATC-143, a 2020 CEA-funded update to prior work by CUREE, is a practical guide to identifying earthquake damage to houses and determining an effective and efficient repair. In this EERI Subscribing Member Webinar, Morgan Griffith of Exponent will provide a summary of key concepts in earthquake damage assessment and repair for houses using concepts from ATC-143.

Speaker:

Morgan Griffith is a Principal Engineer in Exponent's Civil and Structural Engineering practice. He has over 20 years of experience investigating damage to buildings and other structures. He has evaluated earthquake damage to buildings in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Virginia, Mexico and Turkey.

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Public Policy and Advocacy

NEHRP Reauthorization Coalition Seeks Members

EERI is working to grow a coalition that supports Reauthorization of the U.S. National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). Through EERI's Public Policy and Advocacy Committee, EERI leadership has been working closely with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the International Code Council (ICC), the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA), the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), and the Seismological Society of America (SSA) to chart an advocacy path forward. In particular, the coalition is focused on supporting the continued movement and passage of U.S. Senate Bill S.320, the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) Reauthorization Act of 2025, through the legislature.

Any organizations or companies wishing to participate in the coalition or sign-on to an advocacy support letter the coalition is preparing should contact Heidi Tremayne at heidi@eeri.org.

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Students

SDC Interest Survey

We hope the school year is off to a great start for all EERI student members! The EERI Student Leadership Council (SLC) has opened the interest form for university student chapters that are planning to participate in the 2026 Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition (SDC), which will be held at the 13NCEE in Portland next summer.

Prospective SDC teams should fill out the form here by October 17, 2025. Only one person per chapter needs to fill out the survey. More information about the 2026 SDC will be announced soon!

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In Memoriam

Juan Manuel Pestana Nascimento (1963-2025)

Dr. Juan Manuel Pestana Nascimento (M.EERI 2015) passed away on September 16, 2025 in Lexington, Massachusetts. A senior principal at Geosyntec Consultants since 2017, Dr. Pestana had over 35 years of consulting experience in geotechnical and geotechnical earthquake engineering. He earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1994, Dr. Pestana joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught there for the next 23 years, earning the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award—the university’s highest honor for teaching excellence—as well as the loyalty and affection of generations of students and colleagues. He authored more than 150 research publications in the areas of: constitutive modeling, numerical modeling of earth structures, seismic site response analysis, soil properties characterization, and ground improvement for liquefaction mitigation. He was recognized with the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the ASCE’s Arthur Casagrande Award and Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, and the Shamsher Prakash Research Prize. He also served as a National Science Foundation Program Manager for the Geoenvironmental Engineering and Geohazards Mitigation Program, and as Director of the UC Berkeley Pavement Research Center. As a consulting engineer, he retained close ties to the academic life, most recently as a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University.

He is survived by his wife Maria Alexandra Ibanez and his three children, Maria, Juan Andres, and Manuel. View an obituary at the UC Berkeley GeoSystems Engineering page here.

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Oral History

Interviews by Stanley Scott: Henry D. Dewell

Don’t miss the next publication in EERI’s Interviews by Stanley Scott oral history series, focusing on Henry D. Dewell (1881-1946)! Henry D. Dewell was a pioneering engineer in the early development of California’s seismic codes. This volume features an interview with his son, Robert D. Dewell (1910–1995), also a consulting structural engineer.

Download the PDF of Henry D. Dewell from the EERI Digital Library here.

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Announcements

Kinemetrics Webinar on Seismic Instrumentation

Kinemetrics is hosting a free webinar on “Ensuring the Trustworthiness of Seismic Response Data During Emergencies – How Instrument Selection Impacts Real-Time Decision-Making” on October 29, 2025 at 9:00 AM Pacific Time.

Accurate measurements are critical in determining the impact of ground motion on buildings and other infrastructure, and underpin critical key indicators, such as interstory drift, of the seismic performance of buildings.

In this informative webinar and Q&A session, Dr. Khalid Saifullah will review important factors impacting the use and applicability of different kinds of seismic instrumentation under different scenarios. He will also describe the testing procedures and results from a comparative study of accelerometers in a controlled environment designed to represent real-world conditions. Register here to attend the webinar.

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Opportunities

Postdoctoral Researcher in Ground Motion Modeling at the University of Oregon/CRESCENT

The University of Oregon seeks a postdoctoral researcher to join the Cascadia Region Earthquake Hazards Center (CRESCENT) – a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research center that coordinates research, educational, and community engagement activities surrounding earthquake science and hazards in the Pacific Northwest. The postdoc will work closely with Dr. Valerie Sahakian, along with CRESCENT Ground-Motion Modeling Group members (see below), to develop a systematic validation framework for the CRESCENT community velocity model (CVM), that leverages numerical ground motion simulations from both deterministic and stochastic approaches. The ultimate goal is to understand and quantify the impacts of uncertainties in the CVM on physics-based simulation ground motion estimates, to inform the next generation non-ergodic ground motion models (GMMs) for Cascadia, and subsequently seismic hazard estimates.

Review of submissions will begin October 21, 2025 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the position and to apply, view the posting here.

Tenure Track Position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in Architectural Engineering

The Architectural Engineering Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) invites qualified applicants to apply for a full-time, academic year, tenure-track faculty appointment at the Assistant Professor rank to begin August 17, 2026. This is an opportunity for candidates who are passionate about undergraduate education and structural engineering. Cal Poly’s “Learn by Doing” approach provides faculty a unique opportunity to balance teaching and scholarly activities in a collaborative classroom environment. The department’s mission is to educate students to be successful in the practice of structural engineering. Appointed candidate will be expected to teach courses to undergraduate and graduate students in classroom and laboratory settings. Teaching needs in the department include both structural analysis courses and structural design courses focused on building structures. Structural earthquake engineering is emphasized throughout the curriculum with collaboration among the departments within the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

Review of applications will begin December 8, 2025 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the position and to apply, view the posting here.

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Subscribing Member Spotlight

Enidine

Established in 1966, Enidine designs and manufactures energy absorption, vibration isolation and noise attenuation products for a wide variety of industrial, rail, military, commercial aircraft, business jet and helicopter applications. We offer a broad range of highly engineered products to extend equipment life, improve comfort and increase safety and reliability. Enidine engineers continue to monitor and influence trends in the motion control industry, allowing us to remain at the forefront of new energy absorption product development such as our new ECO Series and HDN Series shock absorbers.

WJE

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates is a global firm of engineers, architects, and materials scientists committed to helping clients solve, repair, and avoid problems in the built world. WJE was established in 1956 on the principle that delivering better solutions requires a better understanding of the problem. That’s why we take a hands-on, empirical, and investigative approach to every assignment. Materials, technologies, and structures continue to change, but our basic philosophy hasn’t. Supported by unparalleled laboratory and field testing capabilities, our team brings an enthusiasm for problem solving and a hands-on technical approach to every challenge.

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