The purpose of this PREEMPTIVE Virtual Institute is to build a community for researchers who share interest in understanding, promoting and accelerating the adoption of protective systems for multi-hazard protection of buildings throughout the Pacific Rim to provide for resilient and sustainable societies. The virtual institute brings together a team of 10 NSF funded investigators, from 10 institutions in the United States and involved in 16 active NSF awards, in the areas of protective systems, to form long term global professional relationships, through a virtual research hub, regular workshops and an innovative educational component, with Chilean, New Zealander and Japanese counterpart teams, others around the Pacific “Ring of Fire” and elsewhere globally, all with complimentary strategies and common interests, supported by their own respective federal research agencies. Recent earthquakes around the Pacific Rim in Chile (M8.8, February 27, 2010), New Zealand (M6.3, February 22, 2011) and Japan (M9.0, March 11, 2011) provide poignant opportunities to explore the seismic and multi-hazard (e.g., tsunami) performance of protective systems and better understand the demands and necessary capacity required of these protective systems. These recent earthquakes have resulted in efforts to adopt and adapt seismic protective systems in the earthquake design codes in the respective countries. Similar discussions are currently occurring in the US; however, multi-hazard resiliency and sustainability remain yet more abstract and human nature often waits until after a large domestic event to actually implement new measures. Close international collaboration through the proposed Pacific Rim Earthquake Engineering Mitigation Protective Technologies International Virtual Environment (PREEMPTIVE) institute intends to influence the protective systems research that US researchers are pursuing to ensure necessary enhancements in capabilities are achieved for the inclusion of protective systems in the US code and implementation before our next large seismic event or other natural hazard. The Institute provides an opportunity to learn proactively from our foreign counterparts to better prepare the US for future hazards: i.e., to be preemptive. The PREEMPTIVE Virtual Institute will teach the next generation of globally engaged researchers, document the performance of protective systems in recent earthquakes identifying, as a global community, specific areas of success and challenges to be faced within the field of seismic protective systems, and accelerate advances in innovative research in seismic and multi-hazard protective systems through enhanced international collaboration. The PREMPTIVE Virtual Institute will transform protective systems research today, by better informing and directing researchers with firsthand experience of performance in the recent major earthquakes and tsunami in Chile, New Zealand and Japan, to ensure necessary enhancements in capability are achieved before the next major hazard event occurs in the US.
The Institute adopts a distinctly different approach for the protective systems community in the US to better anticipate structural damage from future large earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes, and avert our risk to these events by conducting research now to address the challenges that will facilitate the implementation of protective systems. In this approach, the US protective community, represented by senior researchers, junior researchers, students and practicing engineers, will participate in a virtual institute, focused workshops, and develop and participate in an online learning module all focused on multi-hazard protective systems. The exploratory work to leverage the existing Network for Earthquake Engineering (NEES) and the future Decision Frameworks for Multi-Hazard Resilient and Sustainable Buildings (RSB) framework, together with our foreign counterpart’s hard learned lessons, for the targeted purpose of advancing multi-hazard protective systems will potentially yield a transformative process by which research is conducted. The project is intended to facilitate the discussion and dissemination of current and ongoing novel research perspectives both in the US and globally.
Principal Investigator: Erik Johnson, Ph.D. Associate Professor, USC
Co- PI : Gisele Ragusa, Professor, USC
Co-PI: Richard Christenson, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut