UC earthquake researcher to receive innovation prize in US

UC earthquake researcher to receive innovation prize in US

University of Canterbury Professor Brendon Bradley will be presented with a prestigious Earthquake Engineering Research Innovation Prize at a ceremony in the United States next month.

A professor in UC’s Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering and Deputy Director of QuakeCoRE: The Centre for Earthquake Resilience, Dr Bradley has been recognised for his innovative and significant contributions to earthquake engineering research and practice.

Dr Bradley will be awarded the 2015 Shah Family Prize at the international Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Annual Meeting in San Francisco on 7 April. The EERI annually awards the Shah Prize to young professionals and academics for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit in the field of earthquake risk mitigation and management.

The citation for the Shah Prize notes: “EERI recognises Dr Bradley's prolific research contributions spanning many disciplines in earthquake engineering, his leadership in highly collaborative international research efforts, and his ongoing efforts to disseminate research to practice and to the public”.

Dr Bradley has contributed to research studies on the 2010-2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and played a significant role in reshaping consideration of earthquake motions and seismic design in New Zealand. He co-led the establishment of QuakeCoRE, New Zealand's National Centre of Earthquake Resilience at UC, and serves as its first Deputy Director.

“It’s an honour to be internationally recognised by EERI for the work that collaborators and I have undertaken over the past decade. It has been extremely rewarding working towards understanding the many lessons from the Canterbury earthquakes with amazing New Zealand and international colleagues, and very satisfying to see many of our research outputs having a measurable impact in the way in which Christchurch is rebuilt, as well as being used for other national and international projects,” Dr Bradley says of the announcement.

In 2014, Dr Bradley was honoured as the youngest individual to receive the Shamsher Prakash Research Award, the most prestigious international award in geotechnical earthquake engineering, and, in 2015, was the youngest recipient of the Young Research Award given by the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering's Technical Committee on Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering and Associated Problems (TC203).

A leading researcher and scientist in several emerging fields of earthquake engineering, Dr Bradley is known for his empirical analysis and physics-based simulation of ground motion intensity, and his development of a generalised conditional intensity measure (GCIM) approach for ground motion selection. His open-source implementation of GCIM is now widely employed by research groups around the world.

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