Celebrating 25 Years - CUREe

Celebrating 25 Years 

adapted from the 2013 CUREE Calendar 

illustrated essays by Robert Reitherman 

© 2013 - All Rights Reserved. 

Cover photo: All cover photos CUREE, except for “Guidelines for Earthquake Damage and Assessment” (Exponent); 

and “NEES Nonstructural Project” (Shojiro Motoyui, Tokyo Institute of Technology). 

CUREE 

Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering 

1301 South 46th Street, Richmond, CA 94804-4600 tel: 510-665-3529 fax: 510-665-3622 

http://www.curee.org

CUREE Organizational Description 

The Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), is a non-profit organization incorporated in 1988 whose purpose is the advancement of 

earthquake engineering research, education, and implementation. As of Fall, 2011, there are 22 member universities in the organization, and approximately 250 individual 

professors belong to CUREE. 

Universities + Research + Earthquakes + Engineering 

CUREE is focused on four things, as its name clearly indicates: universities, research, earthquakes, and engineering. In recent years, it has also branched out beyond the 

earthquake topic to touch on other civil engineering themes, and it has mounted several exhibitions to extend education to the realm of engaging the general public in exploring 

engineering concepts. 

CUREE Past-Presidents 

Wilfred Iwan 

Caltech 

1988 - 1991 

Haresh Shah 

Stanford University 

1992 - 1993 

Stephen Mahin 

UC Berkeley 

1994 - 1996 

Helmut Krawinkler 

Stanford University 

1997 - 1998 

James Beck 

Caltech 

1998 - 1999 

Karl Romstad 

UC Davis 

1999 

Gerard Pardoen 

UC Irvine 

1999 - 2001 

André Filiatrault 

UC San Diego * 

2001 - 2002 

Roberto Leon 

Georgia Tech ** 

2003 - 2004 

Andrew Whittaker 

University at Buffalo, SUNY 

2005 - 2011 

* affiliation at time of presidency, now at University at Buffalo, SUNY 

** affiliation at time of presidency, now at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

President’s Message 

2013 marks the 25th anniversary of CUREE. With this milestone, we 

reflect not only on CUREE’s past contributions to advancing the earthquake 

engineering profession, but also on what our contributions will be 

in the future. 

CUREE has 22 University Members, each with a designated CUREE 

member on the faculty who serves as that University’s Representative. To 

build a future vision, we organized a meeting of the Member University 

Representatives in August, 2012, in San Francisco to discuss how to best 

leverage our organization’s resources through new projects and directions 

that CUREE can pursue. One of the outcomes of this meeting was a list 

of research topics that have the potential to leave an important and lasting 

impact in the earthquake engineering field and that can involve CUREE. 

Based on these topics, a competitive call for proposals for seed-funding to 

be provided by CUREE was put out to the CUREE membership in October. 

That membership comprises about 250 professors who have been admitted 

by the Board of Directors one-by-one based on their qualifications in the 

field. We had an excellent response to the RFP, and in 2013 CUREE will be 

funding several promising initiatives. We hope to continue providing our 

members and practicing engineers with excellent services by having these 

seed-funds bear fruit. 

At times we can find ourselves overwhelmed with so many activities and so 

many professional societies that we forget what each organization is about. 

As a reminder, according to the CUREE website (www.curee.org), CUREE 

represents “the interests and capabilities of engineering faculty members 

and programs in developing research projects that mobilize these capabilities 

in the effort to solve significant earthquake problems.” Education within 

academia and also education of the public about civil engineering are also 

within the organization’s scope. Past projects have also typically involved 

practicing engineers in the field. We have benefited greatly over the years 

from the contributions made by the Directors on our Board who represent 

professional practice. We have also been gratified to see how much of benefit 

to both practice and academia has come from the past several years of 

CUREE’s collaboration with the Applied Technology Council conducting 

projects for the National Institute of Standards 

and Technology, the lead agency for the National 

Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. 

I would like to emphasize that CUREE represents 

our members and we are here to assist you with 

developing research that benefits society by 

utilizing your expertise and providing opportunities 

for your students. Further, we are currently a free service to our membership. 

What other professional organization can say all of this We encourage you 

therefore to take advantage and become involved. For example, you can work 

with CUREE to develop a research team and to head up large (or even small) 

projects. While CUREE’s expertise is centered in the earthquake engineering 

sub-discipline, other aspects of civil engineering are also of interest to our 

members. I look forward to seeing CUREE develop new initiatives in the 

future with the talented members that it represents. 

In the past, we have been successful in working together to advance the field 

thanks to the hard work of our staff, Executive Director Bob Reitherman, 

Associate Executive Director Reed Helgens, and Media Manager Darryl 

Wong, and to our past presidents, the professors pictured on the previous 

page who deserve credit for taking the time from their busy careers to 

lead the organization. Over a hundred different individuals have served as 

members of the Board of Directors, serving without pay to provide their 

guidance for our non-profit corporation. Several hundred professors and 

their students have been funded on CUREE projects, providing the expertise 

that has made our initiatives successful. Some of the fruits of the efforts of 

all these individuals are highlighted in the following pages of the calendar, 

accomplishments for which they can justly be proud. 

Maria Moreyra Garlock 

President, Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering 

Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University

March 1, 1988 marks the date of incorporation of the Consortium of 

Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) as a 

non-profit public benefit organization, although the name at that point was 

California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering. The name 

change relates to one of the steps in the evolution of the organization that 

occurred a dozen years later, one of a few significant phases covered here. 

But first, a necessary preamble back to the years prior to 1988. 

In the 1960s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) annually funded 

earthquake engineering research via grants to universities at about the $1 

million level, for example $1,045,600 in 1967 (Gaus 1969, p. 11), or $7.2 

million in 2012 dollars. The current figure is approximately $50 million, 

of which $12 million is earmarked for research that must use the Network 

for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), and a little less than twice 

that, $20 to $23 million in recent years, for the maintenance and operation 

of the NEES laboratories at 14 universities and an extensive information 

technology system (National Science Foundation 2011, Facilities appendix, 

pp. 47-48). 

The destruction of the 1964 Alaska and especially 

the 1971 San Fernanado Earthquakes provided 

the momentum that helped to pass the National 

Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act in October 

1977 and the resulting National Earthquake 

Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). NSF 

began to annually receive, in round numbers, 

$20 million a year for its earthquake engineering 

and social science disaster grants. Borrowing a 

term from the geologists, who use saltation to 

refer to the way particles such as sand rolling 

along in the wind can be suddenly bumped 

into the air and leap forward, this was a major saltation in the funding for 

earthquake engineering research in the United States. 

A Short History of CUREE 

by Robert Reitherman, Executive Director 

Collapsed highways during the 

1971 San Fernando Earthquake 

source: R. Kachadoorian (121c), 

US Geological Survey 

In 1996, after a national contest, NSF awarded $5 million annually for 

a decade for a national center for earthquake engineering research, that 

being its exact title, headquartered at the University at Buffalo in the State 

University of New York system. The State of New York provided matching 

funds. The collaborating universities in NCEER were centered in the 

Northeast. In the twenty years after NEHRP was established, a number 

of universities around the nation had developed earthquake engineering 

programs, whereas in the 1960s, one could point to a much smaller list, 

mainly California universities and programs at the University of Illinois, 

University of Michigan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

(MIT) (Reitherman 2012, p. 418). 

With the passage of time, those who were in the field at the time may have 

forgotten how acrimoniously the NSF decision was received in California, 

whose entry in the contest, proposing a headquarters at the University of 

California at Berkeley with other California universities as collaborating 

institutions, was thought by many to be the front runner in the contest. It is 

enough of a data point measuring the controversy at the time in this brief 

historical review to mention that both California Senators officially protested 

the decision and a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report had to 

be done to evaluate whether the decision was appropriate (Government 

Accounting Office 1987). The GAO found “no evidence that the panel 

showed favoritism for one proposal over the other” but concluded NSF staff 

should have provided more precise criteria regarding receipt of matching 

funds and done a better job of presenting information to the panel. 

With NCEER a fact of life to which the 

California universities had to adjust, their 

efforts turned to forming some type of multiuniversity 

organization that could compete for 

funds and maintain prominence in the field. 

At that time, the Earthquake Engineering 

Research Center (EERC) at the University 

of California at Berkeley had been growing 

U.C. Berkeley shake table

since its establishment in January of 1968, with its shake table in operation 

by 1972, but there was nothing like NCEER that was set up specifically to 

involve multiple universities. 

Thus in 1987, several key individuals among the 

California universities, including Bruce Bolt, Wilfred 

(Bill) Iwan, and others, took the initiative to set up 

California Universities for Research in Earthquake 

Engineering, incorporated as a non-profit public benefit 

organization on March 1, 1988, and subsequently 

Internal Revenue Service 401 (c) status was obtained. 

At that time, the acronym was spelled CUREe. The 

eight founding university members were California 

Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the 

University of Southern California, and the University 

of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los 

Angeles, and San Diego. 

Professor Bruce Bolt 

source: UC Berkeley 

With the organization in place, the next step was to obtain funding. It 

came from afar, from Japan, from the Kajima Corporation. Through the 

discussions of some key CUREe professors, including Joseph Penzien, 

Alfredo H-S. Ang, and Bill Iwan (Penzien 2004, 

p. 76), a multi-year CUREe-Kajima Joint Research 

Program was established. The key person at Kajima 

was Takuji Kobori. Kobori had been a professor 

at Kyoto University and recognized the value of 

academic research to the development of Kajima’s 

capabilities. In one two-year or three-year phase after 

another, the joint program lasted twenty years, until 

2010. The range of topics was very broad, from ground 

motion studies to particular structural investigations 

Dr. Takuji Kobori 

to seismic risk analyses. 

Another collaboration with Japan came with the 1989 Loma Prieta 

Earthquake. CUREe obtained funding from the Building Contractors 

Society of Japan to systematically compile geologic and strong motion data. 

Following the Northridge Earthquake, CUREe obtained funding from all 

four NEHRP agencies – NSF, U.S.Geological Survey, National Institute of 

Standards and Technology, and Federal Emergency Management Agency – 

to bring together researchers and potential users of the research soon after 

NEHRP research grants had been issued to study the earthquake. Then, 

when enough time had passed for research to be conducted, the second 

phase collected papers together in a multi-volume set that remains the most 

comprehensive single source of information on that earthquake (CUREe 

1998). This multi-year effort was truly national in scope, and no distinction 

was made on the basis of the region of origin of the research. CUREe still 

had its original California set of members, but had begun to become more 

national in its outlook. 

Prior to the 1994 Northridge 

Earthquake, CUREe decided 

it needed a small staff to run 

the organization, and after a 

national search, the author was 

selected as executive director. 

An office was established at 

the University of California 

Richmond Field Station in the second floor of the shake table building 

through the auspices of Professor Stephen Mahin, who was then president 

of CUREe. The office has remained there to date. Budgeting, payment 

approval, NSF grant reporting, audits, and other financial affairs were put 

on a systematic basis, and proposal initiatives were developed. Soon, a large 

grant ($5.2 million) from FEMA was obtained for an applied research project 

concerning woodframe buildings, whose performance in the Northridge 

Earthquake was not as reliable as many engineers had assumed. About the 

same time, CUREe joined forces with the Structural Engineers Association 

of California and the Applied Technology Council to form the SAC Joint 

Venture and devote academic and practicing engineer capabilities toward 

the problem of solving the welded moment-resisting frame problems that 

surfaced in that earthquake. In both cases, CUREe developed the ability to 

manage over 60 subcontracts and deal uniformly with universities inside

and outside the state, another indication the organization was moving toward 

its eventual national, rather than California, composition. 

Meanwhile, the ten-year term of NSF funding to NCEER that began in 1986 

was nearing an end, and NSF decided to hold another contest, but this time 

it left open the possibility of awarding more than one center. The CUREe 

member universities decided that a unified proposal should be developed in 

response, and that process started in January of 1986 when Caltech professor 

Paul Jennings was appointed head of a committee that had one representative 

from each of CUREe’s eight member universities. To obtain the required 

matching funds from the state, a California Seismic Safety Commission bill 

had already been drafted, and CUREe was inserted in the bill’s language 

to be the entity receiving the funding. After several rounds of meetings of 

the Jennings committee, a consensus was reached that U.C. Berkeley should 

be the lead university, and CUREe then had the bill rewritten to make that 

change. By the end of the summer, the bill had passed, and the proposal that 

was later to be approved by NSF was funded, creating the Pacific Earthquake 

Engineering Research Center, PEER. NCEER morphed into MCEER, 

the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, still 

headquartered at Buffalo. A new center, MidAmerica Earthquake Center 

(MAE) headquartered at the University of Illinois, was the third center 

funded by NSF. 

CUREe once again had adjusted to 

the direction taken by NSF, and it 

was to adjust again shortly after NSF 

decided to devote a large portion of 

its earthquake engineering budget 

to what became the Network for 

Earthquake Engineering Simulation. 

Such a network was to be truly 

national, whereas the three centers 

were regionally focused. CUREe’s 

experience with the Woodframe and SAC Steel projects gave it confidence 

that the landscape of academia in the earthquake engineering field had grown 

to be truly national in capabilities, and it decided to open its membership to 

universities outside the state. In 2000, the name changed to Consortium of 

Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering and the acronym to 

CUREE. Almost immediately, the membership quadrupled. In the dozen 

years since its founding, the California-centric membership and outlook of 

CUREE had changed markedly. 

In the competition to establish NEES, NSF called for a consortium to set 

up its administrative hub, in parallel with the competition to decide which 

universities would receive large equipment grants for new or enhanced 

laboratories. CUREE won that competition and by 2004 had put in place 

a new NEES Consortium non-profit organization (Reitherman 2004). In 

that instance, it proved the worth of having a truly national association of 

universities to bring them together to work toward a common goal. 

More projects of the organization are illustrated in the following pages that 

show the variety and range of CUREE’s capabilities that have developed 

over the years. 

References Cited 

California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (1998). Proceedings 

of the NEHRP conference and workshop on research on the Northridge, California 

Earthquake of January 17, 1994. California Universities for Research in Earthquake 

Engineering, Richmond, CA, four volumes. 

Gaus, Michael (1969). “Earthquake engineering support by the National Science 

Foundation,” Report on the NSF-UCEER conference on earthquake engineering 

research, Universities Council for Earthquake Engineering Research, Pasadena, CA. 

Government Accounting Office (1987). Problems found in decision process for 

awarding earthquake center, Washington, DC. 

National Science Foundation (2011). National Science Foundation FY 2012 budget 

request to congress, National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA. 

Penzien, Joseph (2004). Connections: EERI Oral History Series, Joseph Penzien, 

Stanley Scott and Robert Reitherman, interviewers, Earthquake Engineering Research 

Institute, Oakland, CA. 

Reitherman, Robert (2004). “A short history of NEES,” 

http://www.curee.org/projects/NEES/history.html. 

Reitherman, Robert (2012). Earthquakes and engineers: An international history. 

ASCE Press, Reston, VA.

CUREe 

The original logo for this project, based on the Japanese Kanji 

symbol for a person, helped to graphically show the relationship 

with Japan and CUREE (then a California organization). 

Professor Wilfred (Bill) Iwan presents Dr. Masamitsu 

Miyamura with a special plaque commemorating twenty 

years of collaborative research between CUREE and the 

Kajima Corporation. 

Collapse of the Hanshin Expressway of Kobe in the January 17, 1995 Great Hanshin (or Hyogo-Ken-Nanbu) Earthquake. 

- source: Charles A. Kircher 

CUREE 

The CUREE-Kajima Joint Research Program 

Kajima Corporation traces its origins back to 1840, after which it quickly grew to become an industry leader in the 

field of architectural-engineering-construction. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, it is a global operation. Through the 

efforts of CUREE members such as Wilfred Iwan of Caltech, the partnership of CUREE-Kajima was created, and for 20 

years, CUREE was funded by Kajima to engage professors and graduate students, and manage research, in a variety 

of research areas. Many CUREE members were project subcontractors and/or members of the Oversight Committee, 

working with the highly respected Takuji Kobori, head of the Kobori Research Complex, Inc., until his passing in 2007. 

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CONSORTIUM of UNIVERSITIES for RESEARCH in EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

Test specimen from the SAC Steel Project 

CUREe 

From the outset, it was recognized that an interdisciplanary approach to the solution was required, involving practicing 

structural engineers, engineering researchers, building officials and other representatives of regulator agencies or 

standards-setting organizations. 

One of the ductile connections developed from research conducted 

after the Northridge Earthquake. 

- C-.M. Uang (UC San Diego) 

The SAC Steel Project 

CUREE 

With funding from FEMA and the California Office of Emergency Services, research was conducted to develop solutions 

for the identification, evaluation, repair, and modification of damaged welded steel moment frame buildings. Effort was 

also devoted to new design and construction approaches. Numerous technical reports and guidelines were produced. 

The project concluded in 2000, with the reports and technical studies from the project being archived at the website: 

www.sacsteel.org 

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The Northridge Earthquake Research Conference - 

George Housner speaks at the CUREe hosted conference held in 1998 at 

Caltech on the topic of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake. 

The first Ph.D in the United States for work specifically in earthquake engineering was 

earned by George Housner (1910-2008) in 1941. 

Some of the attendees of the first CUREE symposium 

honoring George Housner. 

CUREE 

Housner 

Bertero 

Kobori 

Penzien 

Honoring Those Who Helped To Shape Earthquake Engineering 

Clough 

CUREE is very fortunate to name among its membership, past and present, some of the most respected and internationally 

famous engineers in the field of earthquake engineering. We are honored to have hosted symposiums recognizing a few of 

these members, and have had occasion to design and present plaques and awards recognizing the achievements by individuals 

and organizations who have worked with CUREE in advancing the field of civil engineering. The first symposium held 

by CUREE was in honor of George Housner, widely regarded as the founding father of modern earthquake engineering. 

Iwan 

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CUREE-Caltech Woodframe Project Index Buildings 

An index building is a hypothetical but realistic 

archetypical design, developed almost to the 

point of actual working drawings ("blueprints") 

that could be used to construct it. 

[Clockwise from top] Damage to apartment buildings with tuck-under parking during 1989 

Loma Prieta Earthquake; illustration of torsion; shake table seismic experimentation of a 

3-story apartment building with tuck-under parking tested at U.C.Berkeley; a new steel 

frame, designed to resist seismic forces was installed and tested to simulate how the 

original building could be retrofitted. 

For four basic index buildings, three different levels of quality construction were defined. They 

were subjected to structural and cost analyses. 

CUREE 

The CUREE-Caltech Woodframe Project 

After the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, CUREE and Caltech teamed together and were awarded funds through FEMA 

for the The Earthquake Hazard Mitigation of Woodframe Construction project, or the CUREE-Caltech Woodframe 

Project for short. Its goal was to coordinate engineering investigations and implementation activities whose objective 

was to significantly reduce earthquake losses to woodframe construction. To tackle this large and multi-faceted 

project, it was divided into five interrelated elements, which were managed by CUREE over a five year period. Numerous 

publications were generated and are available through the CUREE publications website. 

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Equipment Sites 

Demonstration of the NEES@UTexas remote 

simulator (a.k.a. T-Rex) 

Demonstration of the NEES@OSU Tsunami 

Wave Basin 

System 

Integration 

Remote 

Participation 

George E. Brown, Jr. 

Professor Bruce Kutter supervising the control room 

for the NEES@UCDavis centrifuge. 

Remote participation by users with the 

NEES@Rensselaer Centrifuge. 

Ian Buckle, then NEES president, addresses 

attendees of the NEES 1st Annual Meeting. 

The original Board of Directors for the 

NEES Consortium. 

Collaboration 

Marta Macias Brown at the First NEES Consortium 

Annual Meering in Park City, Utah. 

CUREE 

NEES Consortium Development Project 

In 2001, NSF issued a solicitation to develop a new organization to manage the NEES Collaboratory, at the same time 

that fifteen earthquake engineering testing facilities were being developed with NEES funding. After a competitive 

process, NSF selected CUREE to start the NEES Consortium. The George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake 

Engineering Simulation (NEES) Consortium Development Project involved hundreds of academic and practicing 

engineers participating in workshops and organizational development meetings over a three-year period, including 

the development of the master budget and proposal for the decade-long operation of NEES. 

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At the 2009 NSF CMMI Engineering Research 

and Innovation conference, CUREE was one 

of the exhibitors providing demonstrations on 

seismic response in structures to the local school 

children, ages kindergarten to high school. 

Exhibits were developed and constructed by 

CUREE. 

CUREE has toured this E-Defense motorized 

shake table model to several venues. 

The free month-long public exhibit on earthquake engineering, 

funded by the City of San Francisco, drew early morning crowds 

on the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. The time the 

of the historic earthquake was 5:12 AM. 

Exhibits demonstrating the effect of 

the frequency of the shaking and of the 

structures. 

CUREE 

Developing Outreach Opportunities for Earthquake Engineering 

To facilitate communications between civil engineers and informal educators (e.g. science museums), NSF funded 

CUREE to produce a monograph "Building Bridges Between Civil Engineers and Science Museums," which presented 

common concerns and areas of mutual benefit for the engineer and museum exhibit designer. CUREE has also 

created outdoor exhibits, traveling exhibits, and customized demonstrations. 

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CUSTOM DESIGNED 

Some exhibits created by CUREE were funded 

by private organizations for display within their 

headquarters. These have included displays 

on seismic disasters represented by historical 

stamps, an 80 foot mural on natural disasters, 

and a variable frequency shake table (shown 

here) that demonstrates with the models and 

accelerograph dynamic response. 

The model makers at Graphic Blade Studios used photos to create a precise model of the collapsed 

Northridge Meadows apartment complex. 

Visitors examine models of apartment 

buildings with tuck-under garage parking, 

shown with and without retrofit. 

CUREE 

Exhibit Development 

CUREE has designed and/or constructed a wide variety of exhibits for use in public displays or to enhance proposals or 

projects. The displays demonstrate earthquake engineering principles, practices, or its history. These exhibits creatively 

fulfill the requirement of funding sources to make research results available to the general public. With funding from 

SCEC, OES, and NSF, models and interactive displays were created for a children's museum by CUREE for an exhibit 

called ShakeZone. To appeal to a wide range of age groups, these exhibits were designed to be both interactive and 

visually appealing. 

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The content of this document is based upon the most current engineering research 

and best practices related to assessment and repair of earthquake damage in 

woodframe construction. The target audience of these General Guidelines is 

homeowners, contractors, insurance claims representatives, and non-engineers 

involved in working with technical consultants and/or post-earthquake damage 

assessment of woodframe construction. 

Earthquake Ground Motions 

and Damage Potential 

Fireplaces and Chimneys 

Floor, Ceiling, and Roofs 

Foundations and 

Slab-On-Grade 

Walls 

Dr. John Osteraas (Exponent) served as lead author and editor of 

these General Guidelines. Key contributiong authors were 

David Bonowitz, Brian McDonald, Akshay Gupta, John Wren, 

Joel Wolf John Fessler, Allison Faris, and Daniel Whang. 

Geotechnical Aspects 

Mechanical, Electrical, and 

Plumbing Systems 

CUREE 

Establishing Guidelines for Assessment and Repair for Earthquake Damage 

The goal of the project was to produce objectively based guidelines that would be used after earthquakes to help 

assess damage and determine associated repairs. The motivation for the California Earthquake Authority to fund 

such a guideline was the destruction of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which raised questions on how to recognize 

the difference between cosmetic versus structural damage, and how to make that determination. The guidelines are 

available through the CUREE website and have been used thousands of times by insurance companies in training 

programs. 

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The dimensions of the test bed structure are 

23 ft (H) x 12 ft (W) x 60 ft (L) 

The Nonstructural Component Simulator (NCS), and the two high 

performance six-degrees-of-freedom shake tables at the University 

at Buffalo-SUNY NEES site were used to test on partition walls. 

Professors Tara Hutchinson (UCSD) and Andre Filiatrault 

(UB-SUNY) inspect the failure of a pipe connection. 

Testing of full-scale partitions, suspended ceilings, and sprinkler piping layouts mounted on 

multiple shake tables at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Nonstructural damage within test structure. 

CUREE 

Simulation of the Seismic Performance of Nonstructural Systems 

NSF awarded a $3.6 million grant to the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) to study the seismic performance of ceilingpiping-partition 

nonstructural systems. The subsystem and system-level full-scale experiments are being conduced at 

NEES equipment sites at UNR and University at Buffalo, while UC San Diego, Cornell, Rutherford & Chekene, Georgia 

Tech, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina A & T are also involved. CUREE is providing management, 

contracting, and education and outreach services, including setting up and maintaining the project website. 

www.nees-nonstructural.org 

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The NEES City Block team 

make adjustments to the 

test specimen as they 

prepare for the next series 

of centrifuge tests at the 

NEES@UCDavis facility. 

3D Autocad images used to build the models visually before actual 

model building occurs to allow for more effective planning of model 

positioning, rack design, and placement of sensors. 

- source: Jonathan Lund 

Student researcher Nicholas Trombetta (UCSD) points out some details 

of the specimen shown on the live video relay to Professor Jonathan 

Bray, principal investigator on this project. 

Drawing showing the soil's eye view of soil-structure interaction 

in a dense urban environment. 

- R. Reitherman 

The UC Davis centrifuge has the largest radius and platform 

area of any geotechinical centrifuge in the US and can carry 

5 ton payloads to 75 g at its effective radius of 8.5 m. 

CUREE 

Seismic Performance Assessment in Dense Urban Environments 

This project focuses on documenting and understanding the seismic performance of soil-foundation-structure 

interaction systems (SFSI) within dense urban environments. The NSF award to UC Berkeley involves testing using 

the centrifuge at NEES UC Davis. UC San Diego, University at Buffalo, and California Polytechnic State Institute at 

San Luis Obispo are also involved. CUREE designed and maintains the project website, as well as providing education 

and outreach services for this project. 

www.nees-cityblock.org 

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Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete 

Mat Foundations 

Seismic Design of Cast-in- 

Place Concrete Diaphragms, 

Chords, and Collectors 

Seismic Design of Composite 

Steel Deck and Concrete-filled 

Diaphragms 

Seismic Design of Reinforced 

Concrete Special Moment Frames 

Seismic Design of Steel Special 

Moment Frames 

Nonlinear Structural Analysis 

For Seismic Design 

Seismic Design of Cast-in-Place 

Concrete Special Structural Walls 

and Coupling Beams 

The Technical Brief series was originally proposed by a group of nationally recognized earthquake professionals in 2003 in ATC-57, 

The Missing Piece: Improving Seismic Design and Construction Practices, to help address topics of interest to earthquake professionals, 

primarily those in the design and construction industries. Some of the topics covered thus far are shown above. 

CUREE 

The NEHRP Consultants Joint Venture 

CUREE, in partnership with ATC, formed the NEHRP Consultants Joint Venture, which, after a competitive process, 

was awarded a multi-year contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be on-call to 

conduct NIST-defined projects. To date, seven of the thirty projects have resulted in NEHRP Seismic Design Technical 

Briefs, practical guides for engineers, one of the ways NIST as lead agency for NEHRP disseminates the information 

of NEHRP-funded research. 

www.nehrp-consultants.org 

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CUREE member Princeton University provided an 

opportunity for their students to design and help 

manufacture several of the exhibits. Princeton undergraduate 

student Elizabeth Deir stands next to the 

torsional resistance exhibit. A close-up of the deck 

models that she designed is shown below. 

source: Jorge Lee (GGBHTD) 

(Left) Original bridge design; (right) with wind retrofit 

bracing that increased torsional stiffness. 

The collection of exhibits, including this bronze tactile-readable tabletop model of the Golden Gate Bridge (above), needed to be designed to withstand both 

harsh weather conditions and the interaction of visitors of all ages and physical limitations. It was also necessary to address the communication issues presented 

by a widely varied international audience. 

CUREE 

The Golden Gate Bridge Outdoor Exhibition 

The Informal Science Education Program within NSF awarded the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation 

District (GGBHTD) $3 million to establish a permanent outdoor exhibition at the Golden Gate Bridge to give the millions 

of people who visit the Bridge each year insights about its engineering, construction, and history. The project has 

education and outreach as the principal focus. CUREE serves as the project manager and the lead exhibit developer, 

working with evaluative and summative assessment components, organizations in site planning approvals, and 

coordinating an international meeting of other major public works agencies from within the U.S. and around the world. 

2013 


An assortment of covers from past CUREE calendars.

Celebrating 25 Years - CUREe

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