Jack Baker is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He uses probabilistic and statistical tools to quantify and manage disaster risk and resilience. He has made contributions to risk analysis of spatially distributed systems, characterization of earthquake ground motions, and simulation of post-disaster recovery. He is an author of the textbook Seismic Hazard and Risk Analysis, Director of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative, and a Co-Founder of Haselton Baker Risk Group. His awards include the Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the Walter L. Huber Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Helmut Krawinkler Award from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the Eugene L. Grant Award for excellence in teaching from Stanford.
The amplitude of ground shaking during an earthquake varies spatially, due to location-to-location differences in wave propagation, attenuation, and source- and site-effects. These variations have important implications for impacts to infrastructure systems and other distributed assets. This presentation will provide an overview of efforts to quantify spatial correlations in amplitudes, via past earthquakes and numerical simulations. Fitting of traditional empirical models will be discussed, followed by the introduction of new techniques to account for soil conditions and other site-specific effects. The role of numerical simulations and new measurement technologies will also be introduced. Finally, some regional risk analysis results will be presented to demonstrate the potential role of spatial correlations on impacts to the built environment.