On November 19, 2015, the PEER Center and EERI Northern California Chapter will host the EERI distinguished lecture “Cities, Earthquakes, and Time” by Dr. Robert Olshansky, Professor and Head at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Date: Thursday, November 19, 2015
Location: Room 250, Sutardja Dai Hall (CITRIS), UC Berkeley (Directions)
Time: 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm, Pacific Standard Time
RSVP: chapterinfo@eerinc.org
Who should attend this lecture?
All researchers, engineers, students, city planners, and others interested in earthquake engineering are encouraged to attend. Consulting firms are encouraged to host this lecture in your office.
A video of this presentation is now available for viewing on PEER’s YouTube Account
Abstract
Dr. Robert Olshansky, Professor and Head at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been selected as EERI’s 2015 Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Olshanksy’s lecture, titled “Cities, Earthquakes, and Time”, examines the relationships of earthquakes to time and the policy implications thereof. The EERI Distinguished Lecture Award is given to members of the EERI Institute to recognize and encourage communication of outstanding professional contributions of major importance for earthquake hazard mitigation.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Olshansky has a BS degree in geology from Caltech, and MCP and PhD degrees in city planning and environmental planning from UC Berkeley. Prior to his academic career, he managed a geotechnical engineering firm in the San Francisco Bay area, and he worked with an environmental research institute in Anchorage, Alaska.
Olshansky’s research and 25 years of teaching cover land use and environmental planning, with an emphasis on planning for natural hazards. Professor Olshansky has studied recovery planning and management after several major disasters. For over a decade, he and colleagues researched the recovery process following the Kobe, Japan earthquake of 1995, and he spent the 2004-05 and 2012-13 academic years as a Visiting Professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University. He researched and advised the post-Katrina planning process in New Orleans, and his book, Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans, co-authored with Laurie Johnson, was published by APA Press in April 2010. He and collaborators have researched disaster recovery in Sichuan Province, China; Tamil Nadu, India; Indonesia; and Niigata Prefecture and Tohoku, Japan. He is currently working on a variety of publications to synthesize common lessons and themes of community-scale recovery following large disasters around the world. He has also published on landslide policy, hillside development planning, seismic hazard mitigation policy, and environmental impact assessment.
The distinguished lecture is organized by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) and co-hosted by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Northern California Chapter.