Johnson Retiring from PEER

November 22, 2021

Claire Johnson photoClaire M. Johnson, PEER Reports editor, will be retiring on December 31, 2021. She has been with UC Berkeley for over thirty years. As a UC Berkeley undergraduate, she typed for Mrs. Ruth Burdy when the Civil Engineering department was chaired by Professor Carl Monismith. She worked for Professor Brady Williamson in the Fire Lab. and later for Professor Jim Kelly, helping him with his first book on base isolation. In 1999, she had a shared appointment as the administrator for COSMOS, whose President was Professor Bruce Bolt, and administrator for Professor Anil K. Chopra in running the journal, Earthquake Engineering and Structure Dynamics. In a subsequent appointment as editor of the PEER Report series over 14 years ago, she has edited numerous reports and worked on two recent impactful projects that each involved dozens of authors and researchers: 1) NGA-East, which produced a dozen reports by multiple researchers over several years, culminating in a report over 800 pages to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; this effort was recently acknowledged by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and 2) the project “Quantifying the Performance of Retrofit of Cripple Walls and Sill Anchorage in Single-Family Wood-Frame Buildings” (PEER-CEA Project), which recently produced 13 reports with over a dozen different authors.

PEER Director Khalid Mosalam commended Claire for her work at PEER, and her ability to “edit highly technical research material and help the researchers communicate their work effectively. This skill will be greatly missed.” He also noted that PEER reports will continue to be published; the report process is being streamlined, and more information will be released soon. Please join PEER in congratulating Claire for a career of service to the earthquake engineering community.