Planning Grant: I/UCRC for Geoscience

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The proposed Center for Earthquake Risk Reduction (CERR) aims to protect lives and infrastructure from the devastating effects of earthquakes through development of tools and strategies to reduce their impact. CERR will solve industry relevant and challenging problems, while providing educational opportunities for students, which are multi-disciplinary in scope. The initial university members of CERR will be the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), the California Institute of Technology (CIT), and the University of Washington (UW). These three institutions already have a close partnership in the rapidly evolving area of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) including having industry partners contributing to that development. Building on this existing partnership kernel, CERR will expand its mission beyond earthquake early warning, attract additional industry and government partners, and welcome additional university partners. This planning grant proposal seeks to fund a two-day planning workshop between the industry, government, and university groups (UCB, UW, and CIT) to map out an initial research agenda, agree on center policies, and establish the Industry Affiliates Board (IAB).The CERR would be in the unique position to bring together industrial, government, and academic expertise to advance the field of earthquake risk reduction. The critical challenge is to translate discoveries in earthquake science into actionable information, which impacts businesses, government sectors, and the public at large. This will be accomplished through the development of real-time information feeds, enhanced research for site-specific risk reduction (including path effects), physics-based rupture scenarios, the integration of low-cost sensor data, and analysis of the mechanics of induced earthquakes. The overarching vision is to push the state of the art in available data and knowledge areas to significantly impact risk mitigation both before and after a large rupture. The I/UCRC framework provides an important mechanism to bring together diverse groups who share common interests, but who have not historically had a method to leverage their individual strengths. Working together, there is a high potential for broad impacts on the challenge of risk reduction. CERR will also train the next generation of student researchers in an environment with an exposure to a broad range of business and government sectors.