Abbie Liel and Shideh Dashti presented "Performance of Buildings on Liquefiable Ground: Assessment and Mitigation " at the combined Geo-Institute and structural Engineering Institute Congress in Phoenix in February 2016. The session was a great opportunity for new and continued conversations between geotechnical and structural engineers. Our presentation was based on the work of Juan Olarte, Balaji Paramasivam, and a number of other students who have been working on centrifuge testing of combined structure/soil systems that may liquefy.
ASCE Structures Congress 2017 to be Held in Denver
I am delighted to be serving as a Local Planning Committee Co-Chair for the 2017 ASCE Structures Congress with Jim Harris. Please consider joining us in Denver next April.
More details about deadlines for session proposals, registration etc. are available on the ATC website.
Sarah's paper on integrated assessment of building resilience and sustainability has been accepted!
Ph.D. Student Sarah Welsh-Huggin's paper, entitled A Life-Cycle Framework for Integrating Green Building and Hazard-Resistant Design: Examining the Seismic Impacts of Buildings with Green Roofs, has been accepted for publication by the journal of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. It examines building performance, in terms of hazard resistance and environmental impacts, of office buildings with green roofs. Check out the paper here!
Be Boulder with Juan and Becca
Our very own Juan Olarte and Rebecca Scheetz were featured in the Be Boulder advertising campaign. Its a nice picture of the laboratory work Juan, Becca, Jenny, Balaji and others have been doing to study liquefaction-induced building damage.
Our interdisciplinary "RIPs" work, One year in
A year ago we were awarded a grant to study The Interdependent Criticality of Built, Social and Information Infrastructures in Community Resilience.
Our RIPs Type 1 project frames community resilience as an interdependence between built, social, and information infrastructures. Our research program trials participatory methods that leverage, describe, and quantify this interdependence to study, model, and improve resilient community infrastructures. The goals of our team’s work are to develop the conceptual framework and methodological approaches for linking these interdependent infrastructures for resilience creation. Specific objectives identified in the original proposal are:
to trial innovative, inclusive, and adaptive processes through which community stakeholders—including individual residents, emergency responders, business owners, planners, political leaders and experts —feel ownership of decisions and outcomes
to develop and pilot advanced engineering probabilistic models of interdependent built infrastructures that incorporate data from empirical survey of damage, social media, and sensors.
to build a multi-disciplinary and collaborative team with a shared vision of the scholarship needed to enhance resilience infrastructures.
Our team proposed to explore this framework against the backdrop of Boulder, Colorado and surrounding communities. We focused our work in Boulder for a couple of reasons. First, shortly before our work began, Boulder was selected for participation in the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge, a network of cities striving to improve resilience. In addition, in 2013, widespread flooding occurred, affecting most of the northern part of the Colorado Front Range and the Colorado plains, killing four people, isolating communities, and significantly damaging buildings and infrastructure. Boulder continues to respond and rebuild from this disaster.
We have included a list of some of the things we are working on below. Please feel free to contact Abbie Liel, or another member of the team, if you'd like more information. In particular, check out the Soden et al. paper for a summary or our early field work as a team, which involved participatory observations of Boulder's Flood Anniversary week in 2014.
Journal Articles
Arneson et al., “Expert Knowledge in the Creation of Resiliency Networks”. Submission expected December, 2015.
Denis et al. “Flood Vulnerability Models for Residential Buildings Based on the 2013 Colorado Floods”, Submission expected October, 2015.
Sprain, “Reimaging Flood Risk: Discourse Analysis of a Stakeholder Interaction During a Participatory Game.” Submission expected January, 2016.
Conference Papers and Presentations
Soden, R., L. Palen, C. Chase, E. Arneson, D. Deniz, L. Sprain, B. Goldstein, A. Liel, S. Dashti and A. Javernick-Will. “The Polyvocality of Resilience: Discovering a Research Agenda through Interdisciplinary Investigation & Community Engagement.” 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2015, Kristiansand, Norway, May 24-27, 2015. Robert Soden was recognized as a finalist for ISCRAM student paper award for this paper.
Chase, C. “Bridging Divided Frames: Environmental Disaster and Everyday Stress in Resilience Thinking”, Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 2015.
Goldstein, B., Sprain, L., and James, T. “The Practice and Possibilities of Collaborative Resilience Assessment.” Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, CO, June 2015.
Chase, C. “The Siloed City: 100 Resilient Ci?es as Communication Design Intervention.” National Communication Association Annual Conference, Urban Communication Foundation Pre-conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, to be presented November 2015
Sprain, L., Liel, A., Javernick-Will, A., Palen, L., Dashti, S., and Goldstein, B. “Reimagining critical infrastructure for community resilience: Interdependent build, information, and social dimensions of critical infrastructure.” Conference on Earth System Governance, Canberra, Australia, to be presented December 2015.
Goldstein, B., “Transformative learning networks”, Transformations 2015 Conference (organized by the Stockholm Resilience Center) in Stockholm, Sweden, October 5-7, 2015.
Sprain, L., Goldstein, B., and Chase, C. “The Communicative Dimensions of Resilience: A Multiscalar Investigation.” Aspen Conference on Engaged Scholarship, Aspen, CO, July 2015.
Arneson, E., D. Deniz, A. Javernick-Will, A. Liel, and S. Dashti. (submitted). “Information Deficits and Post-Disaster Recovery”. ASCE 2016 Constructioon Research Congress (CRC), San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 31-June 2, 2016.
Soden, R., and Palen, L. (submitted). “Infrastructure in the Wild: What Mapping in Post-Earthquake Nepal Reveals about Infrastructural Emergence.” Submitted to the ACM 2016 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
New Graduate Student Fellowship Opportunity
The department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering (CEAE) at University of Colorado Boulder currently hosts a GAANN (Graduate Assistantships in Areas of National Need) fellowship program geared toward engineering resilience.
This fellowship offers support for students working on aspects of engineering resilience, including structural engineering. The diagram below shows some of the exciting collaborations and opportunities that are part of this fellowship.
Check out the GAANN fellowship page for more information and application information. This page is still a work in progress, so please check back frequently if the information you are looking for isn't there yet. Please review the eligibility requirements before submitting an application.
Abbie at University of Auckland until January 2016
I am spending the Fall 2015 semester as a visiting researcher at the University of Auckland. I am exploring collaborations related to earthquake engineering and concrete buildings with colleagues here. While out of the U.S., the best way to reach me is via email (abbie.liel@colorado.edu).
Two New NSF Projects
Abbie is involved with two new NSF projects. The first is a major HazardsSEES effort looking at the impacts of induced seismicity from geoscience, engineering and social science perspectives. Collaborators include Anne Sheehan and Kristy Tiampo (Geo), Liesel Ritchie (Natural Hazards Center), Amy Javernick-Will and Hari Rajaram (Civil Eng.), and Kathryn Mutz (Law).
Graphic showing our proposed research. Check back here for updates as we progress.
In addition, Abbie is the co-PI on a project looking at Hybrid Sliding Rocking Systems for Accelerated Bridge Construction.
Natural Hazards Center Workshop
Our study of flooding in Boulder and efforts to build resilience here was the focus of a panel session at the Natural Hazards Center Workshop in Broomfield. Panel session participants were Abbie, and colleagues Leah Sprain, Shideh Dashti, Amy Javernick-Will and the Chief Resilience Officer for Boulder, Greg Guibert. We had a great graphic artist (Karina Branson of ConverSketch) record the conversation!
Derya and Erin's Poster: Flood Impact Models for the 2013 Boulder Flood
Derya and Erin presented a great poster about flood damage modeling at the Natural Hazards Center Workshop!
Tufte Workshop in Denver
Jenny, Derya and Sarah attended a one-day course on Presenting Data and information, given by Edward Tufte.
Former Students to Start Faculty Positions
Best wishes to past group members Meera Raghunandan and Jared DeBock! Both have worked as structural engineers since completing their Ph.D.s, but are moving to academic positions. Starting in August, Meera will be an Assistant Professor at IIT Bombay, and Jared will be an Assistant Professor at California State University at Chico.
San Andreas, the Movie
Happy Summer! Our research group and friends went to see San Andreas!
Congratulations
Congratulations to Sarah (civil systems) and Cody (structures) who passed their Ph.D. comprehensive exams this spring!
More Good Paper News
Siamak's companion papers have been accepted for publication in Earthquake Spectra. The papers can be found on the publications link.
Paper News
Congratulations to Derek Kozak! Our paper about reliability of roof structures under snow loads has been accepted by Structural Safety. Check out the publications tab for a link to the manuscript.
Also, congratulations to Jared DeBock! His paper comparing probabilistic regional loss methods was accepted by Journal of Earthquake Engineering. Check out the publications tab for a link to the manuscript.
Yolanda's Paper Accepted
Yolanda's paper describing "Framework Methodology for Risk-Based Decision Making for Transportation Agencies" has been accepted by the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering. Check out the publications tab for a link to the manuscript.
