SSA session: Earthquake Ground Motions and Structural Response: Emerging Tools and Applications

[Richard Allen]

Calling all ground motion modellers and structural engineers.  

Consider submitting an abstract to the SSA session on this topic - details below.  

Abstract deadline is January 13, and the meeting is April 14-18, 2026 in Pasadena California.

Session title

Earthquake Ground Motions and Structural Response: Emerging Tools and Applications

Understanding how buildings, bridges, energy infrastructure and the ground beneath them respond to earthquakes is central to both earthquake science and risk reduction. New monitoring approaches—ranging from permanent seismic networks and structural arrays to ambient vibration studies, and the rapid growth of low-cost MEMS and smartphone sensors—are expanding our ability to capture building dynamics and ground motion in unprecedented detail. These observations are providing new insights into structural health, damage processes,  and soil–structure interaction, and the region-wide distribution of risk for large earthquakes. Newly obtainable data also promises to support applications such as rapid post-event regional damage assessment and long-term seismic resilience.

This session invites contributions from across the seismological, engineering, and hazard-modeling communities that address building and ground motion monitoring using traditional networks, emerging low-cost sensors, gradient based sensors such as distributed fiber optic sensing and rotational sensors, novel analytical methods, or case studies from recent earthquakes and experiments. We especially encourage interdisciplinary studies that bridge seismology, structural engineering, and risk mitigation, provide synergistic applications of unique data and high-performance simulations, as well as applications that highlight the potential for scalable monitoring at the urban or regional level.

Conveners
Richard Allen, University of California Berkeley (ral...@berkeley.edu)
Felix Bernauer, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (felix.b...@lmu.de)
Farid Ghahari, California Geological Survey (gha...@gmail.com)
Monica Kohler, California Institute of Technology (koh...@caltech.edu)
Utpal Kumar, University of California Berkeley (utpal...@berkeley.edu)
David McCallen, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (dbmcc...@lbl.gov)
Yara Rossi, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Yara....@lmu.de)

Richard M. Allen

Director, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory
Class of 1954 Professor, Dept. Earth & Planetary Science
University of California, Berkeley  --  http://rallen.berkeley.edu