After a national search, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) is pleased to announce the appointment of Grace Kang as Director of Communications.
Grace is very active in the earthquake engineering community and is especially focused on the effective dissemination and communication of earthquake engineering research and technologies in order to support the wider application of performance-based earthquake engineering. Grace is a Director on the Board of the Structural Engineers Association of California, and was President of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California. She is on the Steering Committee for “Loma Prieta 25: Building Bay Area Resilience”, and she was co-chair of the “Buildings At Risk | Earthquake Loss Reduction Summit” held in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2013, organized by Structural Engineers Associations of Southern and Northern California. She has written articles for the American Institute of Architects California Council, and co-authored “Connections: EERI Oral History Series, Eric Elsesser” issued by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. Grace is a registered Structural Engineer in the state of California with over 25 years of experience in structural engineering consulting, and she has a Master of Engineering degree from the Civil Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. Grace can be reached at g.kang@berkeley.edu
“We are delighted to have Grace as our new Director of Communications,” said PEER Director Stephen Mahin. “Her deep experience in the engineering community will be vital in our work connecting researchers with practicing professionals and policymakers. We feel very lucky to have her onboard.”
PEER is a multi-institutional research and education center with headquarters at the University of California, Berkeley. As the largest earthquake engineering research center in the United States, PEER involves investigators from over 20 universities and research institutions from the US, Japan, Italy, Chile, and China, as well as from numerous consulting firms and various state and federal government agencies. PEER’s research focuses on performance-based earthquake engineering in multiple disciplines including ground motion and tsunami hazard, structural and geotechnical engineering, lifelines, transportation, risk management, and public policy.
In addition to conducting research to develop and apply performance-based earthquake engineering technology, PEER actively engages practicing professionals. This ensures that PEER identifies and uses the best scientific and engineering tools available to solve real-world problems, and that the latest seismic research findings, outcomes, and tools are rapidly disseminated in a useful form to practitioners. The success of PEER’s projects is due to the planned constructive interactions among researchers, funding agencies, and practitioners.