RAPID Awardee Workshop to Identify Research Needs Emerging from the 2010 and 2011 New Zealand Earthquakes and the 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

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The objective of this award is to organize and conduct a workshop for NSF-supported Rapid Response Research (RAPID) awardees to identify themes and directions for research programs resulting from their investigations of the 2010 and 2011 New Zealand earthquakes and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The two-day workshop will be held at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, in 2012. Workshop participants will identify major lessons and opportunities for further research across a range of disciplines, including topics that are cross-disciplinary in nature. Recommendations from the workshop will be shared widely with the broader research and practicing earthquake engineering community in a workshop report disseminated through the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) website (http://www.eeri.org) and EERI's monthly newsletter. This award is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), and the workshop report will also be posted on the NEHRP web site (http://www.nehrp.gov). The New Zealand and Japan earthquakes and tsunami present major learning opportunities for the U.S. research community. The complex nature of these events and resultant disasters provide major lessons and research opportunities across many disciplines. These recent earthquakes and tsunami are among the most significant and relevant events for the U.S. earthquake engineering community in the last several decades. Building codes in both countries are similar to those in the United States for concrete and steel buildings; there are many strong motion records (especially in Japan) that provide valuable data; the geologic setting and tsunami vulnerability for Japan are similar to the Pacific Northwest Cascadian subduction zone; there are similarities and lessons from the transportation, lifelines, and critical facilities sectors; and there are similar social and political issues in the response and recovery. This workshop will provide the mechanism to collect and synthesis observations from the numerous NSF-supported RAPID field studies to identify research needs for earthquake mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery to make the United States better prepared for future disasters.