RESEARCH
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation Award #1554714
A major challenge related to developing the next generation of buildings in the United States is increasing their resilience to natural hazards, while, at the same time, incorporating sustainable practices into their construction, maintenance and operation over their lifespan. This CAREER project is developing complementary research, education and public outreach programs that focus on life cycle design and assessment of resilient and sustainable buildings.
Funding Agency: Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Models that quantify the performance of distributed infrastructure systems support the development and implementation of more informed risk-reduction and resilience-building strategies. The focus of this project is on developing rigorous methods to forecast the functional impacts of natural hazard events on inter- and intra-dependent distributed infrastructure systems.
Funding Agency: California Earthquake Authority (CEA) via the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center
The main objective of this project is to develop scientifically-based information and loss models to quantify the economic benefit of retrofitting seismically vulnerable cripple wall buildings. This will be achieved by executing dynamic and quasi-static cyclic experiments and performing nonlinear response history analyses and economic loss assessments on existing and retrofitted cripple wall buildings. The BRG is contributing to the nonlinear analysis and loss assessment tasks.
Funding Agency: University of California, Office of the President
This project aims to develop a sustained partnership between the Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Morgan State University (MSU) and Howard University (HU), towards meeting the broad objective of increasing the enrollment of underrepresented students in UC graduate programs, particularly Ph.D. programs. To achieve this goal, undergraduate students from MSU and HU will engage in ongoing research at UCLA during the summer, which will be facilitated by collaborations among the faculty at the three institutions.
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation Award#1538866
Tall buildings have become a staple of the central business district in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. They facilitate increased residential and commercial development, offering higher density occupancy compared to their low-rise counterparts on the same area of land. The overall goal of this project is to develop scientific methodologies that enable the use of remote sensing to assess and enhance the seismic resilience of tall buildings in dense urban environments.
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation Award#1538747
Following natural hazard events, federal, state and local government officials must facilitate the recovery of the functionality and well-being of the affected communities. The housing sector plays a vital role in this recovery because schools, businesses, neighborhoods and community-based organizations all rely on residents having healthy living conditions so that they can remain in the affected region. The primary goal of this project was to develop and apply new data and computer models to simulate disaster housing recovery.
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Stochastic Characterization of Aftershock Building Collapse Risk (Funding Agency, USGS)
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“Back to Normal”: Earthquake Recovery Modeling (Funding Agency, Global Earthquake Model)
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A Reliability-Based Assessment of Orthogonal Effects and Ground Motion Directionality on the Seismic Demands in SCBF Steel Columns (Funding Agency, American Institute of Steel Construction)
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Aftershock Seismic Vulnerability and Time-dependent Risk Assessment of Bridges (Funding Agency, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center)