Seismic protective systems, such as base isolation, passive energy dissipation, and semi-active and active control, can be applied to new and existing buildings to provide significant reductions in building motion and damage during earthquakes. The objective of this award is to build a community of researchers from Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, through a virtual institute, to accelerate research on seismic protective systems. This institute will enable U.S. researchers to proactively learn from their foreign counterparts from Pacific Rim countries about the performance of buildings with seismic protective systems during recent major earthquakes in Chile in 2010 and in New Zealand and Japan in 2011, to ensure that seismic protective systems research is directed to better prepare for future hazards. This award will enable the U.S. seismic protective systems community to better anticipate structural damage from future large earthquakes, and avert risk to these events by conducting research now to address the challenges that will facilitate seismic protective systems implementation in buildings.
The virtual institute will incorporate the following face-to-face and virtual activities: (a) one workshop per year, hosted sequentially in the countries of the foreign partners, to provide direct opportunities for U.S. participants to share research and data and chart future research directions with international collaborators, (b) pairings of early career U.S. faculty participants with foreign counterparts to develop case studies about the effectiveness of seismic protective systems in past earthquakes, thereby building long-term research collaborations, (c) lectures by the foreign counterparts and U.S. senior participants about research on seismic protective systems in their country, (d) an on-line, directed-study seismic protective systems course that will be used to teach graduate students in the United States and around the world about the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-research in seismic protective systems, and (e) regular quarterly virtual meetings using online collaboration tools. The virtual institute will bring together researchers on 13 active NSF awards in the areas of seismic protective systems, as well as 20-30 early career participants, to form long-term global research relationships with their international collaborators, who share common research interests and are supported by their respective government research agencies. This award is designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is co-funded by NSF's Directorate for Engineering and NSF's Office of Integrative and International Activities.
