It’s safe to say that Professor Judy Mitrani-Reiser and her S.T.I.R.M. research group love natural disasters – but only because they are looking to develop risk-assessment tools to estimate community impact when these disasters strike.
Therefore, when The New Yorker published an article titled “The Really Big One” that detailed the very real probability of a megaquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest, it caught Mitrani-Reiser’s eye. Hers wasn’t the only one whose interest was piqued – it also caught the attention of the White House. The Obama administration quickly pulled together the Earthquake Resilience Summit and Mitrani-Reiser, along with students who worked on an undergraduate seismic design competition proposal and graduate students from her RIPS project, were on the list of attendees.
The summit brought people from government, industry and academia together to discuss the importance of community benefits of Earthquake Early Warning Systems and provided a platform to announce important steps toward a future with greater earthquake safety through next-generation approaches to earthquake-resilient building and earthquake-warning technologies.