This award supports a workshop in January 2010 to formulate a vision for earthquake engineering in the United States for 2020. Workshop participants representing the diversity of the earthquake engineering community will have the opportunity to gather, distill, and formulate principal and potentially transformative new directions in earthquake engineering research, practice, education and outreach. The next ten years are crucial for development of this engineering discipline. The lack of focus induced by damage in a major earthquake is also a unique opportunity to set the stage for development of areas of earthquake engineering that would not have emerged when driven by an earthquake emergency, and to maximize the use of the state of the art NEES research facilities. Open Space Technology will be used to conduct the two-day workshop. This is a radically new way to conduct a workshop. It is based on a single strong theme and relies on self-organization of the meeting participants to generate, develop, refine, and formulate the meeting outcomes. The workshop is facilitated by a professional facilitator and guided by the workshop organizers to produce the desired outcomes.
Objectives and Broader Impacts: The objectives of the workshop are to: 1) describe a desired state of earthquake engineering in 2020; 2) identify major trends in earthquake engineering research, education and outreach to transform the current state into the desired state; 3) identify the enabling theories and technologies, as well as education and outreach methods; and 4) identify a set of metrics to measure the progress along the identified path. The plan for transformation of earthquake engineering will broadly impact the coming generation of students through the identification of new research and practice interests and new approaches for conducting multidisciplinary work. The workshop report will be broadly disseminated through the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) web site at www.nehrp.gov.
Intellectual Merit: The key to success of this workshop is the interaction of experts from different disciplines that represent the entire earthquake engineering ecosystem. This workshop will yield a new vision for earthquake engineering: one of a complex system of interacting disciplines where new knowledge is generated through intellectual efforts at the intersections of the constituent branches of science and engineering.
