Asian-Pacific Network of Centers for Earthquake Engineering Research (ANCER) Workshop
Group photo, taken during the first day of the workshop.
After the great success of previous meetings held in Harbin, China (2002), Hawaii, US (2004), Jeju, Korea (2005), and Hong Kong, China (2007), the 2009 ANCER Workshop was hosted at the University of Illinois on August 13-14. The conference, chaired by Dr. Amr Elnashai, included two keynote lectures and more than 60 papers presented to nearly 100 in attendance for the sessions held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science.
With over 140 abstracts and 80 full papers to review, the Local Organizing Committee put together two programs with 63 presentations of high-quality papers from researchers around the globe. In addition to these presentations and tours of the research facilities located at the Nathan Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory, the workshop showcased keynote lectures from Professor Stephen Mahin, Director of PEER at UC-Berkeley on “New Design Approaches to Improve Earthquake Resiliency and Sustainability” and Professor Key-Chyuan Tsai, Director of NCREE in Taiwan on “Seismic Experiment and FE Analysis of Full-Scale Steel Concentrically Braced Frames”.
The main objective of this series of meetings was to provide a medium for integration of various approaches to studying and managing earthquake risk, with an emphasis on low and medium seismicity regions. The focus of the August 2009 workshop was to encourage young researchers to present their own work and have an opportunity to receive feedback from international experts in a collegiate environment. From the technical perspective, the main workshop theme was learning from recent earthquakes, especially related to field reconnaissance and back-analysis.
Asian-Pacific Network of Centers for Earthquake Engineering Research (ANCER) was founded in October 2001 with 7 national centers on earthquake engineering in the Asian-Pacific region. It has expanded globally and become a unique international nonprofit, professional organization with 13 national centers in 2009. ANCER is an early realization of the vision of a connected world where young researchers in particular can build alliances that serves them for a lifetime of global cooperation and boundless exchange of knowledge.
The primary function of ANCER is to coordinate and optimize resources in the respective countries to develop and implement, on a cooperative, center-to-center basis, innovative engineering methods and new enabling technologies for design, construction, maintenance, management and renewal of the built environment to achieve the maximum seismic hazard reduction and minimum life-cycle cost. ANCER has emphasized over the years the training of young researchers in earthquake risk and had recently developed a students and researchers exchange program.
More pictures for the conference, here.
