UCLA Garrick Risk Institute Awarded $1 Million Caltrans Contract for Earthquake Hazard and Seismic Risk Analyses
Research will inform seismic design standards for buildings, bridges and other critical infrastructure in the U.S.
UCLA Samueli Newsroom
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has awarded a $1 million research contract to The B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. The funding will support a new initiative to improve earthquake hazard characterization and seismic risk analysis of transportation structures, particularly bridges.
The four-year project will be administered through the Natural Hazards Risk and Resiliency Research Center (NHR3), a multidisciplinary and multi-campus research center within the Garrick Risk Institute. The effort represents an advancement in seismic research with broad implications for infrastructure resilience and public safety.
“Caltrans has been a key supporter of earthquake engineering research for a long time, and we are very pleased they have selected UCLA to coordinate important earthquake engineering tasks,” said Yousef Bozorgnia, a UCLA Samueli professor of civil and environmental engineering and the project’s principal investigator.
The research will focus on re-examining uncertainties in earthquake ground motion models, enabling more realistic and accurate computations of probabilistic seismic hazard, especially in the Western United States. The results will influence seismic design for a wide range of structures, from buildings and bridges to lifelines and critical infrastructure.
As part of the initiative, UCLA researchers will develop multiple online tools that provide access to large earthquake databases created in earlier Caltrans-funded UCLA studies. The project builds on Next Generation Attenuation-West 3 (NGA-West3), a recently completed, community-based effort coordinated by UCLA researchers. The team compiled a global database of recorded earthquake motions, including data from the Western U.S., Greece, Iran, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan and Turkey. These records have been critical for developing next-generation ground-motion predictive models used by the U.S. Geological Survey to construct seismic hazard maps, which form the basis of national seismic design codes.