Natural hazards engineeringat regional scales
We study how earthquakes, hurricanes, and wildfires affect the built environment across entire regions — from characterizing the hazard, to building inventories of what stands in its path, to simulating damage and turning those estimates into decisions about risk.
Based in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCLA.
Hazards we study
Earthquakes
Physics-based regional ground motion simulation, soil-structure interaction, system identification from instrumented buildings, and rapid post-earthquake damage assessment.
Hurricanes
Wind and surge loss modeling for coastal building stock, informed by insurance claims data and developed with partners across several institutions.
Wildfires
Coupled fire–atmosphere simulation, AI-based fuel mapping, and hyperlocal risk assessment at the wildland–urban interface.
Software
We develop and contribute to open simulation and inventory frameworks, including BRAILS within the NHERI SimCenter and the Hercules earthquake simulator.
See what we've releasedRecent news
Bechtel Fellows Seminar Series
Invited seminar: Computational science in service of natural hazards engineering.
NHERI DesignSafe Dataset Award
Awarded for the IRIS-Wildfire dataset documenting the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
Santa Clara County FireSafe Council
Presented UCLA wildfire risk research to the council.