President 
Term: 2023-2024

Biography

Janiele Maffei is the Chief Mitigation Officer at the California Earthquake Authority (CEA), where she manages the California Residential Mitigation Program, the retrofit incentive program Earthquake Brace and Bolt, various research projects, and other mitigation efforts that will benefit both policyholders and California homeowners. She received an M.S. degree in Civil (Structural) Engineering and A.B. degree in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and is licensed as a Civil Engineer and Structural Engineer, with over 40 years of experience in the design of new buildings, retrofit designs of existing buildings, seismic evaluations, seismic loss estimation studies, design of equipment anchorages, preparation of construction documents, project management, and construction administration. After fifteen years as a project manager and regional office director with Degenkolb Engineers, she opened her own practice where she managed complex design projects, before joiniing CEA in 2011. She is a past President of the Northern California Chapter and previously served on the Board of Directors as Secretary-Treasurer.

President Elect 
Term 2024

Biography

Dr. Ellen M. Rathje is the Janet S. Cockrell Centennial Chair in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering and a Senior Research Scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is the Principal Investigator for the development of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure for the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). She also is a founding member and previous Co-Chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association. Dr. Rathje served as a member of the EERI Board of Directors from 2010-2013, and was the 2018 recipient of the William B. Joyner Lecture Award from the Seismological Society of America and EERI. Her many awards and honors include the 2022 Peck Award and Lecture from the Geo-Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the 2006 Shah Family Innovation Prize from EERI. She was elected a Fellow of the ASCE in 2016.

Vice President
Term: 2021-2024

Biography

Ayse [eye-sha] Hortacsu is Director of Projects at the Applied Technology Council (ATC) in the San Francisco Bay Area and has been a member of EERI since 2001, ever since she graduated from Stanford University. She is currently serving as the Chair of the EERI Oral History Committee that seeks to connect current members to those who have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake engineering by recording their impressions, judgments, and experiences. As a Housner Fellow in 2014, Ayse helped complete a project on building code implementation in Nepal. She served as a Director for the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC) in 2016-2018 and the EERI Northern California chapter in 2009-2012.

Secretary/Treasurer
Term: 2024

Biography:

Keith L. Knudsen has served as the Deputy Director of the USGS Earthquake Science Center for about a dozen years, and has also served as the Earthquake Hazard Program’s Northern California Coordinator. He is a Quaternary geologist and geomorphologist who specializes in the assessment of earthquake hazards. Prior to joining the USGS, he led and worked on projects characterizing seismic hazards for large engineered facilities at URS Corporation in Oakland. Before joining URS, for eight years, Keith managed the Liquefaction Zoning Unit and the Bay Area Regional Geologic Mapping Unit of the California Geological Survey’s Seismic Hazards Zoning Program. He served on the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s Northern California Chapter Board as a Director and as President spanning the 2006 anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. He also served as Secretary of the Seismological Society of America for nine years. In his roles in the public and private sectors, he has been successful in identifying partner organizations and building relationships so that innovative projects get supported and completed. He lives about a kilometer from the Hayward fault.

Director
Term: 2024-2027

Biography

Rebecca Laberenne is an independent consultant with over two decades of experience focused on improving the quality and safety of the built environment, with particular interest in housing, social infrastructure and building regulations in urban and urbanizing communities with high natural hazard risk. She was previously the Director of Programs for the global organization Resilience Rising, a Senior Consultant to the World Bank’s Global Program for Safer Schools, and Associate Director for Innovation in the Built Environment at The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative. She has consulted for The Rockefeller Foundation, GeoHazards International, The Resilience Shift, Resilient Cities Catalyst and Resilient Cities Network. A member of EERI for almost two decades, Rebecca was a 2017 Housner Fellow. 

Director 
Term: 2024-2027

Biography

Mike Mahoney is Director of Projects for the Applied Technology Council (ATC) and operates his own firm, MG Mahoney Consulting, which assists with developing outreach materials for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Earthquake and Building Sciences Program. From 1991 to 2022, he was a Senior Geophysicist and Technical Team Leader for the FEMA  Earthquake Program. He has participated in multiple Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) reconnaissance teams, including to Chile in 2010, and has served on the EERI Honors Committee for the past 4 years. His awards include the EERI Alfred E. Alquist Medal Recognition Medal, the International Code Council Community Service Award, and the Applied Technology Council and Structural Engineering Institute Champions of Earthquake Resilience Award. 

Director
Term: 2020-2024

Biography

Terri R. Norton, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean for Students and Strategic Initiatives and professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Bucknell University. She also serves as the executive director of the Engineering Success Alliance. Terri’s technical expertise is in the area of structural dynamics and structural vulnerability. Her research interests involve evaluating the effects of hazards on civil structures, debris management, and disaster reconstruction. Prior to Bucknell, Terri was faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  She was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Japan for her debris management and reconstruction research following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. She has been a member of several post-disaster reconnaissance teams including Molise Earthquake (2003), Hurricane Charley (2004), Tohoku (2011), Hurricane Harvey (2017), and Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017). Terri is a founding leader of the William “Bill” Anderson Fund (BAF) and an invited member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Resilient America Roundtable. 

Director
Term: 2021-2024

Biography

Carlien Bou-Chedid an Independent Consulting Structural Engineer in Ghana. Her career has spanned more than 35years and covers a breadth of activities. She worked as a structural engineer with the Architectural and Engineering Services Corporation (AESC now AESL) where she was engaged in the design, supervision of construction and rehabilitation of several structures in Ghana. She was later engaged as Director, Education and Training of the Ghana Institution of Engineering (GhIE) during which period she was involved in designing policies and programs for the education and training of engineers. She also served as the Executive Secretary of the GhIE responsible for management of its administrative and financial affairs.

Director
Term: 2022-2025

Biography

Zahraa Saiyed, P.E., Associate AIA, LEED AP, M.EERI, 2011, is a multi-disciplinary disaster risk reduction, public policy, and risk governance consultant with background and training as an architect, building scientist, structural engineer, and educator. She is a co-founder and principal of Scyma Consulting located in the Bay Area, a Research Affiliate with MIT’s Urban Risk Lab, and is a Senior Disaster Risk Reduction Consultant for the World Bank, where she works on earthquake engineering, wildfire management, mental health, and community engagement. Zahraa has co-chaired the EERI Public Policy and Advocacy Committee since 2018. In this role, she has contributed to the advancement of seismic safety policies at all governmental levels, advocated on behalf of EERI, and facilitated the creation of regional public policy committees. She is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley in Architecture and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Architecture and Structural Engineering with coursework from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Director
Term: 2022-2025

Biography

Nick Gregor, Ph.D., is a consulting seismologist located in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area and has been an active member of EERI since 1992. His primary discipline and focus for the past 25 years is for the understanding and application of seismological principles, research, and models for seismic hazard assessments. After completing his Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, he joined the seismology group at Bechtel, which provided a great learning environment for technical interactions between seismologists, geotechnical, structural, and earthquake engineers. His tenure of nearly 25 years culminated in 2019 as the senior seismologist for the company. Since leaving Bechtel, Nick has been an independent consultant working on small and large projects both domestically and internationally. Nick is currently the EERI representative for the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) National Steering Committee and a member of the technical workshop meeting planning committee for the Consortium of Organization for Strong Motion Observation Systems (COSMOS).

Director
Term: 2023-2026

Biography: Ashley Morales-Cartagena is a disaster risk reduction professional with 15 years of experience working in academia, industry, the public sector and international development. She is a professor and researcher at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), where she served as Director for the past four years and founded the EERI PUCMM student chapter. She also served as head of the Disaster Risk Management and Geotechnical Engineering departments at the Domincan Republic’s National Bureau of Seismic Evaluation and Infrastructure Vulnerability (ONESVIE). Ashley co-chaired the EERI Younger Members Committee from 2019-2021 and received the EERI’s Younger Members Award in 2018. Ashley pursued her graduate studies (MS) as a Fulbright Scholar in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She also holds an MS in Construction Management from the Santo Domingo Institute of Technology (INTEC) and a BS in Civil Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. Most recently she founded Mujeres en la Ingeniería (MIRD), the first NGO focused on supporting women to pursue careers in engineering in the Dominican Republic.