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                     Mary C. Comerio Professor of the Graduate School (Architecture) Mary Comerio is an internationally recognized expert on disaster  recovery. She joined the faculty of the Department of Architecture at  UC Berkeley in 1978 and served as chair from 2006-09. As an  architect, she has designed numerous public and private facilities  including market-rate and affordable housing. In the last two decades, her research has  focused on the costs and benefits of seismic rehabilitation for existing buildings  (particularly housing), post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, and loss modeling. Professor Comerio was the principal investigator on the pilot study for the Disaster  Resistant University Initiative funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and  UC Berkeley in 1998. The research on the economic impacts of disaster losses on the UC  Berkeley campus was published in 2000, along with a strategic plan for risk management.  In April 2006, the Applied Technology Council and Engineering News-Record selected the  Disaster Resistant University Program as one of its top U.S. seismic projects of the 20th  century. Other projects include a 2004 study of the impacts from contents losses in science  laboratories with colleagues at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center  and downtime modeling for the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering  methodology. Professor Comerio is currently working on a Network for Earthquake  Engineering Simulation (NEES) Grand Challenge project titled "Mitigation of Collapse Risk  of Older Concrete Buildings."  For the 2009-10 academic year, Professor Comerio served as a Visiting Fellow at the  Public Policy Institute of California, and consulted with the United Nations Environment  Program (UNEP) Post-Conflict and Disaster Management branch on rebuilding after  disasters in China and Haiti  TITLE:  Resilience: An Engineering Challenge  ABSTRACT Risk modeling has focused on the "3Ds: Deaths, Dollars and Downtime" as metrics for  estimating building and infrastructure performance as well as for decision-making in  design and in policy development. What can these metrics tell us about performance and  resilience in recent disasters? What other measures of performance are suggested by the  recovery experience in both developed and developing countries? What are the  engineering challenges and research opportunities coming out of recent earthquakes in  China, Haiti, Chile, New Zealand and Japan, and how are they applicable to the U.S.  context? Are there better engineering metrics for resilience? The performance metrics typically used by engineers use work component by component  (e.g. for a building or bridge) but not for a city. Resilience requires metrics that look at  the performance of community components such as housing, education, civic and cultural  infrastructure. Looking at case studies of recovery from recent earthquakes—primarily  Maule and Christchurch—we see that the "3 Ds" don't tell us much about recovery.  Available funding, political will, creative planning, and good technical implementation  typically govern the speed and quality of recovery. To improve resilience, our professions need to have a voice and participation in the kind of land use/policy planning that usually takes place without our input and we need to re-  think performance measures and building codes in order to develop methods of setting  performance guidelines for cities. How we improve overall performance and resilience in  countries with good codes and land use practices as well as in developing countries are  challenges for the 21st Century. Back to Speakers overview