Vice President
Biography
David A. Friedman is a licensed structural engineer and senior principal, chair of the Board of Directors, and former president and CEO of Forell/Elsesser Engineers, Inc., in San Francisco. At F/E for 30 years, David has had a deep involvement in many landmark projects including San Francisco City Hall, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the recently completed Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life in Palo Alto, and currently the Student Athlete High Performance Center and the retrofit of California Memorial Stadium at UC Berkeley.
David has been an active member of EERI since 1988, including chairing the EERI Endowment Commit-tee, committee membership on Development and Investments, serving on the local organizing committee for the Golden Anniversary Annual Meeting (1998), and chairing the 2010 Local Organizing Committee for the Annual Meeting in San Francisco. David has been an annual ambassador and speaker at college and university campuses across the country as part of EERI’s Visiting Professional Program. His passion-ate advocacy for EERI’s role in advancing seismic risk mitigation and in research and education led to his endowing the Visiting Professional Program in 1999, to ensure the permanency of that program. David also participated in two Learning from Earthquakes reconnaissance teams: 1993 in Kobe, Japan, and 2008 in Sichuan, China, and the subsequent briefings on each event.
David’s professional career is also interlaced with active involvement on professional, educational and social justice not-for-profit boards. David is a trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation, former president of the Board of the Jewish Home of San Francisco and current chair of the Jewish Senior Living Group, former director of the Architectural Foundation of San Francisco, and new director of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR). With devoted ties to UC Berkeley, David serves on the Advisory Council to the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the College of Environmental Design. And his own stated highlight: chairing the Board of Trustees of The San Francisco Foundation.
Vision
EERI is a unique membership organization, where its eclectic multi-disciplinary composition is both its best asset and strongest challenge. The common goal is, simply stated, to reduce the impact of earthquakes throughout the world. Whether we are engineering practitioners, researchers, educators, or social scientists, we live and work in a world that is increasingly interdisciplinary and reliant on the collaboration and integration of our agendas and efforts. Though tempting for each of us to get caught up in the safety of our own “silos,” we can’t lose sight that comprehensive solutions have to be multidisciplinary in conception. I doubt I would recommend that EERI become a multihazard-focused organization, but who can doubt the learning we have undertaken from the recent spate of hurricanes, floods and fires.
My vision as an EERI Director would primarily be to:
- Fully represent this varied membership of EERI by being an appropriate fiscal steward of the dues and contributions that sustain the organization and develop sustainable governance policies;
- Assist the president and the full Board in becoming “member-centric” by making sure we under-stand and deliver on the benefits and resource accessibility that is of critical importance to the current membership AND particularly to the future young membership;
- Facilitate the interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations between engineering practitioners and academic institutions to further the EERI strategic initiatives in education, technical development, outreach and international activities;
- Promote the potential synergistic partnerships with EERI and its regional chapters with other not-for-profits or municipalities to create model earthquake risk mitigation programs, for example a liaison between EERI and SPUR to further programs such as the City of San Francisco’s Resilient City Initiative;
- Find collaborations with NGOs so that EERI not only is the source of experts on Learning from Earthquakes but also contributes to the planning and rebuilding programs, particularly in third world countries devastated by earthquakes, as we see occurring throughout Haiti today; and
- With a happy and satisfied membership, spearhead funding and membership development to ensure EERI’s financial viability, growth, and outreach into the future.
