SYMPOSIUM CELEBRATES
CORNELL'S AMAZING CAREER

On October 1, 2005, over 100 colleagues, former and current PhD students, friends and family gathered at Stanford University to celebrate Professor C. Allin Cornell's "promotion" to Professor

Emeritus and to reflect on his wonderful career spanning five decades. The day long symposium featured speakers from every part of Allin's varied history, who spoke about their personal experiences with Allin and professional collaborations. The speakers included Ross Corotis, Erik Vanmarcke, Ove Ditlevsen, Daniele Veneziano, Luis Esteva, Tom Hanks, Ronald Hamburger, Robin McGuire, Robert Kennedy, Hugh Banon, Gabriel Toro and Sverre Haver. The moderators for the day were Helmut Krawinkler, Paolo Bazzurro, Anne Kiremidjian and Lance Manuel. After the symposium the guests enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the Stanford Faculty Club and several people, including Allin's children, Eric, Robert, Joan, Phillip and Ariane, gave comments and recollections.

BLUME DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
PART OF QUAKE '06 LECTURE SERIES

Eric Elsesser, founder partner of Forell/Elsesser was named the 2005/2006 John A. Blume Distinguished Lecturer. He delivered his talk "Improving Seismic Safety and Performance of Buildings Through Innovative Structural Engineering". The Blume Distinguished Lecture is an annual event that honoring John A. Blume given by a structural engineer whose career best exemplifies Dr. Blume's outstanding achievements. Elsesser discussed the engineering methods, such as base isolation, that his firm used on the San Francisco and Salt Lake City Halls and the Asian Art Museum.
The lecture was part of the Quake '06 Centennial Lecture Series which ran from October 2005 to March 2006 and featured seven speakers on subjects ranging from the history of the 1906 quake to dealing with catastrophic disasters. For more information about the specific lectures, please see the Quake '06 website at http://quake06.stanford.edu.

A student checks out a Quake '06 Centennial Walking Tour poster in front of the Cantor Arts Center. The poster, one of 11 around the main part of campus, discusses the opportunities that present themselves in restoring buildings after earthquakes. The Blume Center helped develop the tour which focuses on different aspects of the campus in response to the earthquake and future directions Stanford is taking. For more information on the walking tour, please see the website, http://quake06.stanford.edu.

PUBLISHED PAPERS

Fabbrocino G., Iervolino I. and Manfredi G.: "A Rational Approach to Damage Mitigation of Classical Columns", Journal of Construction and Buildings Materials, Elsevier.

Iervolino I., and Cornell C.A.: "Record Selection for Nonlinear Seismic Analysis of Structures", Earthquake Spectra, Vol.. 21, No. 3, 685-713, August 2005.

Iervolino I., Manfredi G., and Cosenza E.: "Ground Motion Duration Effects in Nonlinear Seismic Structural Analysis", Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, 35:21–38, January 2006.

Baker, J. W., and Cornell, C. A. (2006). "Correlation of response spectral values for multi-component ground motions." Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 96(1), 215-227.

Andrade, Jose E. and Borja, Ronaldo I., "Quantifying sensitivity of local site response models to statistical variations in soil properties." Acta Geotechnica (2006) 1:3-14.

Baker, J. W., and Cornell, C. A. (2006). "Which spectral acceleration are you using?" Earthquake Spectra, 22(2), 293-312.

Kesner, K.E, and Billington, S.L, (2005) “Investigation of Infill Panels made from Engineered Cementitious Composites for Seismic Strengthening and Retrofit,” ASCE J. Structural Engineering, 131(11): 1712-1720.

BLUME CENTER NEWS

Professor Sarah Billington was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure on September 1. She was also named a Fellow of the American Concrete Institute in March of 2006.
Professor Sarah Billington participated in the Stanford-in-Oxford program in the Fall. She and her family lived in Oxford, England for the Quarter and she taught an introduction to structural engineering course to a group of Stanford students. While in England, she gave research seminars at the Departments of Engineering at Cambridge University and at Oxford University.

Professors Helmut Krawinkler and Greg Deierlein participated in workshops organized by the Los Angeles Tall Buildings Structural Design Council and the PEER Center on seismic design and performance of tall buildings in September and November. Krawinkler led discussions on the P-Delta and strength degrading effects and their relevance to nonlinear analysis procedures and assessment.

Dr. Renate Fruchter was a guest lecturer for one week at Bauhaus University, Weimar Germany, in October where she presented topics related to global teamwork, collaboration technologies, and workspaces.

Professor Greg Deierlein presented a paper, co-authored with Curt Haselton (PhD student) on "Benchmarking the Collapse Safety of Code-Compliant Reinforced Concrete Moment Frame Building Systems" at the ATC-JSCA Workshop, held in Kobe Japan, on Oct. 17-19, 2005. Deierlein was also a speaker in an EERI-PEER Workshop on Seismic Performance of Existing Reinforced Concrete Buildings, held in San Francisco (Jan. 12.), Seattle (Feb. 10) and Los Angeles (Feb. 13). His presentations were on building system performance assessment by nonlinear time history analyses.

Professor Ronnie Borja co-organized and attended a Workshop on Nonlinear Modeling of Geotechnical Problems: from Theory to Practice, sponsored by NSF, at the Johns Hopkins University Campus on November 3 and 4, 2005.

Professor Greg Deierlein represented the PEER Center at the NSF-ERC Annual Meeting held in Washington D.C. on Nov. 16-18, 2005, where he co-chaired a breakout meeting of ERC center directors on fostering interdisciplinary research and education.

Professor Ronnie Borja attended the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting held on December 5-9, 2005, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. His graduate students, Craig Foster, Pablo Sanz, and Joshua White presented papers at the Meeting.

Professor Jack Baker presented a paper at the Second International Forum on Engineering Decision Making on April 26-29, 2006, in Lake Louise, Canada.

Professors Greg Deierlein, Helmut Krawinkler, Anne Kiremidjian, Sarah Billington, Eduardo Miranda, Dr. Martin McCann and several Stanford graduate students participated in the PEER Year 9 Annual Meeting held in San Francisco, Jan. 20-21, 2006. Deierlein gave a plenary presentation on the use of performance-based engineering to improve building code provisions; Krawinkler made a presentation on performance-based engineering in tall building design; and McCann presented a talk on the seismic risk analyses for the California delta and levee system. See details at: http://peer.berkeley.edu/2006AM/program.html

Professor Ronnie Borja presented a paper on combined stochastic-deterministic analysis of local site response at the 2nd Asia Conference on Earthquake Engineering held in Manila, Philippines on March 10-11, 2006.

Ph.D. Candidate Won Lee attended the 2006 Euro-C conference on Computational Modeling of Concrete and Concrete Structures in Austria in March. He delivered a paper co-authored with Prof. Billington titled “Simulation of Self-Centering, Segmentally Precast Concrete Columns for a Probabilistic, Performance-Based Assessment.”

Congratulations to our students who recently received their degrees. Master of Science degrees were awarded in Fall 2005 to Ruchir Agarwal, Kadidit Ajanant (DCI), Hye Young Cha, Gabriel de Hauss-Boncza, Nischint Gangahar, and Omer Ulker; doctorate degrees were awarded to Calvin Kam and Jessy Kang in the DCI program. In Winter 2006 the following Master of Science degrees were awarded to Eva Cheung, Megan Folkmann, Chih-yu Hsu, Marios Kyriakides, Andy Myers, Uchenna Okoye, Scott Okrent, Mohammed Saberi, Fawad Shaikh, and Griffin Thornock. An Engineer's Degree was awarded to Evangelos Stergiou.

RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

A Computational Framework to Simulate Human and Social Behaviors During Emergency Evacuations

Xiaoshan Pan, Charles S. Han, Kincho H. Law ,
and Jean-Claude Latombe