News of the Institute

Leadership Communique from President Ellen Rathje: The Future of EERI’s Annual Meetings

As EERI Past President Janiele Maffei and I shared in our joint communique last year, EERI made the difficult decision to skip the Annual Meeting in 2025 in order to focus on rethinking the historical format of the annual meeting while also allowing EERI staff to get a head start on planning for the 13th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering in 2026.I am excited to report that we convened an Annual Meeting Reenvisioning Working Group and we have a plan for a new and improved EERI Annual Meeting in 2027!

The working group was tasked with recommending a meeting format that best reflects the needs of EERI’s diverse membership while achieving financial stability. We evaluated the lessons from EERI’s recent experiments with different formats (such as the virtual meetings in 2021 and 2022, and the one-day meeting in 2023) and took stock of the challenges of increasing costs and changing attendance patterns for in-person events. We came to the conclusion that it was critical for EERI to continue holding an in-person annual meeting because of the value of coming together as a community on a regular basis, but that some changes to the format were needed. We have decided that EERI will adopt a revised annual meeting framework that preserves a full in-person annual meeting with a two-day technical program, but with a few significant changes.

The technical program for the new Annual Meeting will be developed through an open call for Technical Abstracts and Sessions, such that we can engage a broad cross-section of the membership to present their research findings, case histories, best practices, etc. The Annual Meeting will include concurrent technical sessions and dedicated poster sessions (with a new Best Poster Award), as well as award lectures, plenary sessions, networking lunches, and pre-meeting workshops. We expect that this new format will better serve our members both in terms of presentation opportunities and technical exchanges.

The second change is separating the annual meeting and the Undergraduate Seismic Design Competition (SDC), with future SDCs hosted at a location and time distinct from the annual meeting. Due to their focus on the competition, undergraduate participants have limited time and interest to participate in the technical program of the annual meeting, and separating the two events allows us to reduce venue costs for the annual meeting. The 2025 SDC was hosted at the University of California at Berkeley, and based on this successful experiment EERI will hold the SDC on university campuses for the next four years.

Other logistical changes include the potential for a multi-year meeting location model that would allow us to hold the annual meeting in the same city and venue for multiple years in a row, with a preference for locations on the west coast of the U.S. This shift will allow EERI to negotiate better venue and hotel contracts and reduce costs and staff time associated with contracting for a new location for each meeting. Finally, we are also considering a slight change in the timing of the annual meeting to avoid overlap with other annual events that may post conflicts for many potential attendees.

These recommendations were presented to EERI’s Board of Directors at their May 2025 meeting and the Board approved moving forward with this plan.

I look forward to sharing more updates with you soon, and I want to thank all participants in the working group for their hard work and contributions: Maha Kenawy, Mike Mahoney, Andrew Makdisi, Brett Maurer, Jeff Rubin, Zahraa Saiyed, Erin Sibley, Megan Vandervort, David Wald, Emrah Yenier, Heidi Tremayne, and Silvana Cobos.

Ellen Rathje
President, EERI

 

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