Speakers

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Click on the titles below to view the presentation abstracts.

Shannon Abeling

Research Fellow, University of Auckland

Title: The Resilient Buildings Project

Shannon Abeling is a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. She completed her PhD in Civil Engineering in 2021, which focused on the seismic risks associated with masonry buildings in New Zealand. Her current research explores societal expectations for the seismic performance of new buildings in order to inform future building regulations and standard updates. She is involved with the NZSEE Resilient Buildings Project and QuakeCoRE IP1: Functional Recovery with Repairable Multi-Storey Buildings. Shannon has previously served as President and Outreach Coordinator for the QuakeCoRE Emerging Researchers Chapter Auckland.

Pathmanathan Brabhaharan

Technical Director, WSP

Title: Looking to the Future for Seismic Design – Considerations to improve NZ resilience

Brabha is a Technical Director with WSP and a member of the NZSEE management committee, with a passion for enhancing the resilience of our built environment and communities to natural hazards. He specialises in geotechnical and earthquake engineering, and resilience.

He champions infusing resilience through a range of small to large projects involving planning and design of infrastructure and buildings, both new and existing. He also leads resilience assessments for infrastructure systems and helps prioritise and implement investment to enhance resilience through business cases and strengthening design.

Brabha combines applied research, design practice, development of standards and guidance, and advocacy through the society, technical presentations and papers to promote resilience. His current interests are the promotion of resilience-based design, addressing earthquake and climate change resilience and sustainability in an integrated manner.

Charlotte Brown

Managing Director, Resilient Organisations

Title: TheResilient Buildings Project

Charlotte Brown is joint Managing Director of Resilient Organisations. As a social scientist with a civil engineering background, Charlotte often works at the interface between physical and social sciences. Charlotte’s areas of specialty include risk management, systems thinking, decision-making and organisational resilience.

Alistair Cattanach

Director, Dunning Thornton

Title: From New Seismic Hazard Models to new Design Practice – Challenges and Opportunities

Alistair Cattanach is a Director of Dunning Thornton, Wellington with over 25 years’ experience consulting in NZ and the UK. He has a passion for heritage buildings and challenging architecturally expressive structures, and is a Fellow of Engineering NZ. He has been an innovator in Seismic Retrofit and Low Damage Design techniques in concrete, steel, timber and masonry, and has held advisory/professional consulting roles in many of his areas of interest.

Hugh Cowan

Hugh Cowan Consulting Ltd

Title: The Resilient Buildings Project

Hugh has worked in Earth and Engineering sciences for the past 30 years with a strong focus on hazard risk research and risk management. His accomplishments include the establishment of New Zealand’s “GeoNet” hazard monitoring system, the evolution of the New Zealand Geotechnical Database, and the sharing of New Zealand hazard risk knowledge with global reinsurance markets to retain and grow New Zealand’s national disaster resilience.

Ken Elwood

Lecturer, University of Auckland

Title: From Ductility to Repairability

Prof. Ken Elwood joined the University of Auckland in July 2014 after 11 years on faculty at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He served as the inaugural Director of Te Hiranga Rū QuakeCoRE: Centre for Earthquake Resilience.

In November 2021 Ken started a multi-year secondment to the New Zealand Government to serve as the MBIE/EQC Chief Engineer (Building Resilience). Through this role, Ken champions the resilience of New Zealand’s built environment, by establishing strong stakeholder connections and promoting collaboration between relevant research, policy, and practice players.

Ken received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995, and BASc from the University of British Columbia in 1993.

Helen Ferner

President, NZSEE

Title: The Resilient Buildings Project

Helen is currently the President of NZSEE. A structural engineer Helen experience is focussed particularly on the seismic design of new buildings and the evaluation and seismic strengthening of existing buildings. She was based in San Francisco during the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes where Helen gained extensive skills in the assessment and design of a wide range of building typologies, skills she has applied more recently following the 2010/2011 Christchurch earthquakes. Helen further extended her knowledge of the impact of earthquakes by visiting Japan as part of the NZSEE earthquake reconnaissance trip following the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake later reporting back the findings through publication in the NZSEE Bulletin.

Helen initiated and leads the Resilient Buildings Project, an across industry project under the leadership of NZSEE and funded by EQC, which has the objective of aligning future approaches to earthquake design that are attuned to and expertly respond to societal needs for seismic resilience. The intent is that this work will set the stage to review and potentially realign the Building Code seismic provisions to better reflect societal expectations of building performance.

Matt Gerstenberger

Principal Scientist and Seismologist, GNS Science

Title: From New Seismic Hazard Models to new Design Practice – Challenges and Opportunities

Matt is a Principal Scientist and Seismologist at GNS Science. He has been at GNS Science since 1996 and leads the 2022 National Seismic Hazard Model Revision Project. His research interests have centred on developing improved methods for modelling seismic hazard. He has a particular interest in understanding how to better quantify, reduce and communicate the uncertainty in seismic hazard source models; this includes developing methods for testing the predictive skills of the models. In the last decade has led the earthquake hazard and forecasting efforts and the development of time-dependent hazard models in response to the Canterbury and Kaikoura Earthquake Sequences. He obtained his PhD in seismology from ETH-Zurich in 2003.

Michelle Grant

Director, LGE Consulting Ltd.

Title: Designing for Uncertainty

Michelle is a chartered professional engineer, director of a small structural engineering consultancy in the Wairarapa and current president of SESOC.

Didier Pettinga

Technical Director, Holmes Consulting

Title: Looking to the Future for Seismic Design – Considerations to improve NZ resilience

Didier is a Technical Director with Holmes Consulting, based in Christchurch as part of the Buildings/Structures team where his role encompasses project delivery, technical advancement and design guidance development. As an active advocate for resilient seismic design, over the past 10 years he has been involved in a range of new building and strengthening projects. Many of these have incorporated seismic base isolation or supplemental damping technology in aid of targeted low-damage seismic performance. He also holds a Professor of Practice position at the University of Canterbury, teaching aspects of structural design practice and structural assessment methodology.

As an Industry Representative he is also keeps a foot-in-the-door with research, having been part of the Flagship 1 Ground Motion Simulation in QuakeCoRE 1, and with the new QuakeCoRE phase, he is part of the Inter-disciplinary Programme Functional Recovery with Repairable Multi-Storey Buildings.

Max Stephens

Lecturer, University of Auckland

Title: Looking to the Future for Seismic Design – Considerations to improve NZ resilience

Max Stephens is a Lecturer at the University of Auckland. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2016, and came to New Zealand in 2019 from Pittsburgh, PA (USA) where he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is focused in the area of structural engineering with an emphasis on resiliency and engineering structures for extreme events. Specific research interests include advancing earthquake engineering tools and practice through the integration of high resolution experimental and numerical analysis, developing innovative systems to mitigate damage in buildings and infrastructure, and quantifying the environmental impacts of seismic damage and resilient design.

Tim Sullivan

Professor, University of Canterbury

Title: Designing for Uncertainty

Tim is a Professor of Structural Earthquake Engineering at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He has been leading research in New Zealand via roles with both QuakeCoRE and the Resilience to Natures Challenges Built Environment Theme. Tim’s research interests lie mainly in the examination of the fundamentals of seismic design, assessment and experimental testing techniques. Tim has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications related to seismic design, assessment, retrofit and mitigation of seismic risk. Tim is also a chartered professional engineer with the UK institute of Civil Engineers and Engineering NZ, having worked in the UK, New Zealand, Germany and Italy on a wide range of building and bridge projects.

Andrew Thompson

Technical Director, Holmes Consulting LP

Title: Designing for Uncertainty

Andy Thompson is part of Holmes Consulting’s Buildings/Structures team, where his role encompasses project delivery, technical advancement, and the co-leading of Holmes Consulting’s competence development programme. He has a simple passion for good engineering design that makes sense and is understood. A large part of Andy’s project experience encompasses seismic assessment and retrofit, and post-earthquake damage evaluation/repair. Through hindsight, this process exposes many great and enduring designs—and contrasts them against the expensive and potentially life-threatening consequences of poor decisions. This continues to be an important source of lessons—both for the continual stream of technical insights but also for the behaviours we model as trusted professional engineers.

Charlotte Toma

Lecturer, University of Auckland

Title: Looking to the Future for Seismic Design – Considerations to improve NZ resilience

Charlotte joined the University of Auckland in 2018 as a lecturer in the Structures Group. Her research projects include Creating the Carbon Case for Resilient Design – linking sustainable and seismic design practices, Tsunami loading on structures, and beyond code seismic resilience in timber housing. Across her roles at the University, as lead of the Developing Leading Women Programme and within SESOC she is active in bringing change to the structural industry.

Charlotte holds a BE(hons), and a PhD from the University of Auckland where her research focused on the seismic assessment and retrofit of unreinforced masonry buildings, and has been cited in The Seismic Assessment of Existing Buildings 2017 document and ASCE 41. Following her PhD she worked as a design engineer for Holmes Consulting for 6 years, working on a range of assessment and new-build projects including the Commercial Bay development.