The James Roberts Best Paper Award was presented to Brian Chiou of the California Department of Transportation at the Fifth National Seismic Conference on Bridges & Highways, in San Mateo, in September. The paper, "An Overview of the Project of Next Generation of Ground Motion Attenuation Models (NGA) for Shallow Crustal Earthquakes in Active Tectonic Regions," was co-authored by Maurice Power of Geomatrix Consultants, Norman Abrahamson of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and Clifford Roblee of NEES Consortium Inc. The project is a partnered research program conducted by PEER , USGS and SCEC. The award was granted in recognition of a Caltrans employee whose paper discusses a deployable research innovation that is expected to have a significant impact on the practice of the bridge engineering profession. Read the full paper (pdf file).
