This award provides partial travel support for approximately fifty U.S. graduate students and early career faculty to participate in the 9th U.S. National and 10th Canadian Conference on Earthquake Engineering: Reaching Beyond Borders, July 25-29, 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (http://2010eqconf.org/). This joint conference is sponsored by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and the Canadian Association for Earthquake Engineering (CAEE). This is the first time these two major earthquake engineering associations have joined forces to hold a bi-national conference. It is critically important that graduate students and early career faculty have an opportunity to present the results of their current research in this important international forum, and be exposed to cutting edge research being conducted by scientists and engineers on both sides of the border, at this formative stage in their careers. EERI will administer the travel grant, advertise broadly the availability of travel support, convene a blue-ribbon review panel to evaluate applications, coordinate travel arrangements, and handle all administrative procedures involved in ensuring the participation of early career, earthquake engineering researchers. The intellectual merit of this proposal is reflected in the access the conference provides these early career researchers to the leading researchers and professionals from the United States, Canada, and other countries involved in earthquake hazard mitigation. As in previous national conferences, this joint conference will stimulate new collaborative research efforts and conference participants will be exposed to exciting new ideas and concepts that expand their intellectual curiosity far beyond their current intellectual borders. This conference will have substantial broader impacts. The conference will host approximately 1,000 papers, addressing all aspects and disciplines that contribute to earthquake engineering and earthquake risk reduction, for inclusion in the electronic conference proceedings, which will be made available via the World Wide Web following the conference.
