UCLA Civil & Environmental Engineering Department
C&EE 200 Section 1 Seminar
Structural, Geotechnical and Civil Engineering Materials
Simulation of regional post-earthquake recovery for performance-based engineering
and resilience
Jack W. Baker
Professor
Stanford University
bakerjw@stanford.edu | web.stanford.edu/~bakerjw
State of the art performance‐based earthquake engineering (PBEE) procedures such as FEMA P‐58 generally
treat buildings as “islands,” with respect to modeling regional impacts and post‐earthquake recovery.
Some research, and the REDi resilience framework, provide additional in‐sights regarding regional impacts.
But direct quantitative assessment of regional impacts and recovery remains a distant goal in general. This
paper presents an overview of recent research to advance direct simulation of these effects within a PBEE
framework. Specifically, work to scale FEMA P‐58 single‐building assessments to a regional scale is demonstrated.
Then, refinements to include the impact of damaged roads and neighboring buildings on repair and
recovery time‐lines is presented. Finally, a coupled assessment of economic and physical impacts is illustrated,
in order to account for private‐sector decision‐making and regional industrial capacity con‐straints
on recovery. Collectively, these developments move us closer to having regional‐scale performance assessments
that can incorporate a broader range of factors in forecasts, and thus can support a broader range of
decision‐making to increase community resilience.
Where: Engineering VI 134A
When: 12:00 – 12:50 PM, Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Professor Baker’s work focuses on the development and use of probabilistic and
statistical tools for managing risk due to extreme loads on the built environment.
Prof. Baker joined the Stanford faculty in 2006 from the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (ETH Zurich), where he was a visiting researcher in the Department of
Structural Engineering. He has degrees in Structural Engineering (Stanford, M.S.
2002, Ph.D. 2005), Statistics (Stanford, M.S. 2004) and Mathematics/Physics
(Whitman College, B.A. 2000). His awards include the Shah Family Innovation Prize
from EERI, the NSF CAREER Award, the Early Achievement Research Award from
the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability the Walter L. Huber
Prize from ASCE, the Helmut Krawinkler Award from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern
California, and the Eugene L. Grant Award for excellence in teaching from Stanford.