Update from the NHERI NCO:
Forging International Partnerships with Japan, Taiwan

Published on December 5, 2017

 

Julio Ramirez
NHERI NCO

International partnerships connect NHERI to complementary research efforts underway across the globe.

That is why the NHERI Network Coordinating Office (NCO) has renewed earthquake engineering research collaborations between the U.S. and Japan and established new ones between the U.S. and Taiwan.

The NHERI NCO and Japan’s National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, NIED, reached a formal agreement last summer. (See details here.)

The first annual meeting of NHERI and NIED took place Oct. 31-Nov. 1 in Tokyo. It was a great success. The preliminary draft of the final report will be posted on the DesignSafe-CI website. It will enable researchers to become informed on potential topics of collaboration, possible research proposal topics and the process of establishing collaboration with the lead researchers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Resilience Project, which serves as the basis for the collaboration using NHERI and E-Defense facilities.

More than 20 researchers attended the meeting where a variety of possible research topics were discussed under the themes of wood, steel plus protective systems, reinforced concrete and non-structural components.

Our partners in Japan are led by Prof. Akira Nishitani from Waseda University and Dr. Koji Kajiwara from E-defense. Ultimately, the NHERI-NIED/E-Defense relationship will inform the global vision of earthquake, wind, and coastal inundation risk mitigation and leverage the experimental facilities in the U.S. and Japan.

Please be sure to check the NHERI-NEID partnership page in the first week of December for a report on this collaboration.

Questions about NCO activities? Send us a note.


 

NHERI Science Plan


The NHERI SCIENCE PLAN serves as a roadmap to guide future hazard engineering research and ensure that researchers in related disciplines work together to achieve common research goals — all aimed at keeping the civil infrastructure, and it's human inhabitants, safe.

Hazard researchers preparing grant proposals to NSF are urged to consider tenets of the Science Plan when developing their proposals.