PEER students sponsored to attend EERI's Liquefaction Seminar
PEER and EERI jointly sponsored three PEER students to attend this spring's EERI Liquefaction Seminar. The seminar highlighted two of PEER's researchers at UC Davis, Professor Ross Boulanger and Professor Emeritus I. M. Idriss. The event focused on recent progress in the evaluation of liquefaction hazards during earthquakes and how to estimate the potential for triggering liquefaction, its consequences, and its mitigation.
UCLA graduate student, Ahmadreza Mortezaie, attended the seminar on March 10th at Caltech. He found the seminar "very informing and a perfect comprehensive reinforcement of what was taught at UCLA. It was also interesting to see almost all the industry professionals (in Southern California) filed in one place and hear their point of views on different issues too."
Students Joshua White from Stanford and Aikaterini Ziotopoulou from UC Davis attended the seminar in San Francisco on March 17th. Joshua White felt that he "came away with a wealth of knowledge about the current state-of-the-art in liquefaction research, as well as some understanding of open questions that remain to be addressed." Additionally the speakers impressed him by the "balanced approach they took to understanding liquefaction behavior, placing equal importance on theory, experiment, and field-observation." This event also gave him a unique opportunity to communicate with an expert in his field from a different institution. In his own words, "I had a chance to speak one-on-one with Prof. Boulanger after lunch, and we had a good discussion about constitutive models and numerical methods for understanding liquefaction behavior. He offered quite a few observations that I think will prove tremendously valuable in my own research."
PEER and the PEER students sponsored to attend this event send their thanks to EERI for planning such a successful seminar.
posted March 23, 2009