Milestones, Research, People, Technology & engineering

Seismic expert Khalid Mosalam appointed to lead PEER

By Public Affairs

Khalid M. Mosalam, Taisei professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley, has been appointed director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), a multi-institutional research and education center headquartered at Berkeley.

Mosalam will succeed six-year director Stephen Mahin on Jan. 1.

Khalid Mosalam

Khalid Mosalam (PEER photo)

S. Shankar Sastry, dean and Carlson professor of engineering at Berkeley, says Mosalam is “globally recognized as a foremost authority on the seismic performance of buildings, bridges and civil infrastructure that are essential to public safety and community resiliency. PEER serves an important public mission, and we are confident Khalid Mosalam will sustain it’s prominence and impact.”

“I am very humbled to follow a line of prior PEER directors who are truly giants of earthquake engineering,” says Mosalam. “As director, I intend to build on the multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary collaborative community of researchers that has enabled PEER to become the primary earthquake engineering research arm of California.

“PEER will continue to focus on a performance-based engineering approach to earthquakes and other hazards such as tsunami,” Mosalam adds. “We will also continue working in the areas of consequential and socioeconomic impacts at a regional, national and global scale.”

Mosalam, who has been on Berkeley’s civil and environmental engineering faculty since 1997, leads its Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Materials program and has long been affiliated with PEER. He was one of the developers of nees@berkeley, a facility for modeling and testing structures to extreme loads, along with assessing and rehabilitating essential civil infrastructure such as bridges and electrical substations.

Read more about Mosalam’s appointment and achievements, and learn more about PEER, on the center’s website.