James M. Kelley is the winner of EERI's 2008 George W. Housner Medal

At EERI’s Annual Meeting in New Orleans last month, EERI member James M. Kelly, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, was awarded EERI’s highest honor, the George W. Housner Medal , for his pioneering work in the fields of seismic isolation and energy dissipation.

Kelly has been an influential educator, researcher and consultant in engineering mechanics, structural engineering, and earthquake engineering. He did pioneering work in dislocation mechanics, dynamic plasticity, impact and wave propagation. He developed the first energy-dissipating devices in 1971 to be used in earthquake-resistant structures. Since then, he has led the way in experimental investigations of elastomeric seismic isolation bearings by conducting many pioneering studies of seismically isolated structures and structures with energy dissipators.

Kelly was responsible for the first U.S. shake table investigations of the response of structures containing energy dissipators, and has conducted component and system-level experimental and analytical research on many concepts. He was instrumental in several of the early U.S. energy dissipation applications, consulted on the implementation of viscous dampers for the suspended spans of the Golden Gate Bridge, and for the first major U.S. building damper project, the Santa Clara County Civic Center Building that was retrofit with viscoelastic dampers following the Loma Prieta earthquake. He worked to develop seismic isolation for low-cost housing in developing countries as a consultant to the United Nations (UNIDO), and has consulted on projects in Armenia, Chile, China, India, and Indonesia, where isolation has been used for residential complex construction. He initiated seminal investigations on the seismic behavior of secondary systems that led to his development of methods for protection of equipment from seismic damage by the use of joint passive and active isolation strategies.

He was the first in the U.S. to teach university-level courses on seismic isolation and energy dissipation. He has been a consultant to international seismic isolation projects and has conducted short-courses and seminars worldwide. An outstanding teacher and lecturer, Kelly has directed over thirty doctoral students in their Ph.D. thesis research who have gone on to become noted practitioners, university professors, and researchers worldwide.

His work is the foundation for many of the base isolation design codes used today, including UBC, IBC, and CBC. Base isolation has been used for seismic retrofit of major buildings in the U.S. including historic structures such as the city halls of Salt Lake City, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Various forms of seismic isolation and energy dissipation methods have been used in more than 1,000 major structures worldwide.