Lichtenstein Distinguished Lecture - Chris Poland

Communities are healthy, vibrant, and sustainable when they are well governed and growing by driving economic development while also protecting their cultural heritage. Success, in part, depends on a healthy built environment that is rooted in contemporary urban planning, sustainability and disaster resilience. Disaster-resilient communities must have credible disaster response plans that assure the ability to govern and provide flexibility for people to do what is needed to recover quickly. The people understand what has happened and work together to shelter-in-place. Power, water, and communication networks begin operating again shortly after a disaster, and within weeks people are living normally at home, are able to travel as needed, and have resumed a fairly normal routine. The return to a “new” normal begins quickly, in a planned manner, and is achieved within a few years. Reconstruction financing plans and construction standards need to be in place before the emergency. For the past 6 years, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) have been developing policy recommendations for the City of San Francisco related to transforming the City into a disaster resilient community. The resulting guidelines and recommendations are available for application to communities worldwide regardless of size or location.

Speaker: Chris Poland, Chairman and Senior Principal, Degenkolb Engineers, San Francisco

Chris Poland’s career includes a broad range of structural engineering projects and a wide variety of professional activities. These include new design work, seismic analysis, structural evaluation, strengthening of existing buildings, failure analysis work, historic preservation, and research activities. He received his B.S. in Mathematics Summa Cum Laude, from University of Redlands in 1972 and M.S. from Stanford University in 1973. Chris presides as Chair of the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction for NEHRP. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association and a past president of Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. He received the H.J. Brunnier Award for Excellence in Design in 2002 and the Alfred E Alquist Award for Earthquake Mitigation in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.

Host: Hojjat Adeli (phone: 614-292-7929)