The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) is pleased to announce that Michael Olsen (M.EERI 2004) is the recipient of the 2024 EERI Distinguished Lecture Award in recognition of his pioneering work applying geomatics to identify spatial geologic seismic hazards as well as risks to distributed systems.
The Distinguished Lecture Award is awarded to members of the Institute to recognize and encourage communication of outstanding professional contributions of major importance for earthquake hazard mitigation and to communicate developments on topics of major significance for earthquake hazard mitigation. Olson will deliver the Distinguished Lecture, on a topic to be announced, at the EERI 2024 Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington in April.
Olsen is the CH2M Hill Professor of Geomatics in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University. He obtained BS and MS degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the collaborative application of geospatial technologies to natural hazards as well as infrastructure monitoring and management. He has participated on several post-earthquake reconnaissance teams to collect detailed 3D point cloud data to document damages. He has studied the impact of rockfalls on dwellings during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, landslides triggered by the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake, and liquefaction-induced damage at CentrePort, Wellington, New Zealand. He was also part of a team that developed seismically-induced landslide hazard mapping of Western Oregon.
Olsen serves as the Technical Director for the NSF Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) RAPID Facility, the Director of the Cascadia Lifelines Program (CLiP), a member of the Partnership and Applications committee of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Science Center (CRESCENT), an Associate Editor of the ASCE Journal of Surveying Engineering, the Past-President of the Surveying and Geomatics Educators Society (SaGES), and a co-founder and CEO of a tech transfer spinout company, EZDataMD, LLC.
