President-Elect 
Term: 2026

Biography: Scott A. Ashford, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, is a Professor of Geotechnical Engineering and former Dean of the College of Engineering, Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, Oregon. He just completed 12 years as Dean of the College of Engineering, where led the college to significant growth in research, enrollment, and national influence. A recognized leader in earthquake engineering and higher education, he is known for bringing people together around a shared vision, and then collectively implementing that vision.  Dr. Ashford earned his Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from OSU in 1983 and began his career at CH2M HILL in the San Francisco Bay Area. He later completed his M.S. and Ph.D. in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an international expert in blast-induced liquefaction, soil-structure interaction and slope stability. He is the author or co-author of over 60 refereed publications and has participated in over a dozen post-earthquake investigations, several on behalf of EERI. After time in private industry, as well as academic appointments at the Asian Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego, he joined OSU in 2007 as Head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering and was named Dean of the College Engineering in 2014. Under his leadership, the college graduated 24,000 engineers into the workforce, tripled research expenditures, and raised nearly $400M through philanthropy. Beyond academia, Dr. Ashford has influenced public policy. Most recently, he completed eight years on the governing board of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries DOGAMI), chaired the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program for the Oregon Transportation Commission, and chaired the Taskforce on Implementation of the Oregon Resilience Plan. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and received the ASCE Oregon Section’s Government Engineer of the Year Award in 2023. Dr. Ashford has been involved in EERI as a member for over 30 years and serving on the EERI Board of Directors from 2012 through 2016. He co-chaired 10th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering (NCEE) in Anchorage and is co-chair of the 13th NCEE in Portland in 2026.

President 
Term: 2025-2026

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.

Secretary/Treasurer
Term: 2024-2026

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: 2025-2028

Biography: Craig A. Davis, Ph.D., PE, GE is a consultant specializing in geotechnical, earthquake, and lifeline infrastructure system resilience engineering. He spent 32 years at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, where he held leadership roles including Chief Resilience Officer and Seismic Manager, and developed a comprehensive water system resilience program. Since retiring, he has continued to consult and contribute to infrastructure policy development aimed at reducing risk from natural hazards. Dr. Davis holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Southern California and is a licensed Civil and Geotechnical Engineer in California. He is actively involved in national and international committees focused on geotechnical engineering and lifeline system resilience. His work has earned numerous honors, including ASCE’s Le Val Lund and Charles Martin Duke Awards, and EERI’s 2021 Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2023, he was recognized as a 'Pipeline Engineer – Water' by the ASCE Utility Engineering and Survey Institute.

Director
Term: 2025-2028

Biography: Lindsey Maclise has been an active member of EERI since 2012, joining the organization shortly before being honored as part of the inaugural class of Housner Fellows. Her leadership within EERI includes serving as Chair of the 2016 Annual Meeting, chairing the Housner Fellows selection committee, and representing the Institute as a Friedman Family Visiting Professional at multiple universities. Lindsey earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from UC Berkeley, where she now chairs the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Advisory Board. She is a Principal Structural Engineer at Forell | Elsesser Engineers in San Francisco, where she leads the firm’s Carbon Neutral Initiative. In addition to her EERI involvement, Lindsey recently completed a board term with the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC) and has served on several other local nonprofit industry boards. Her broad experience in technical leadership, education, and sustainability reflects her commitment to advancing the profession. Lindsey brings a collaborative spirit and a deep dedication to the mission of EERI.

Director
Term: 2025-2028

Biography: Bartoletti is CEO and Chair of the Board at Degenkolb Engineers where he has spent his entire career and seen the company grow from a single office with 50 people to 10 offices with over 350 people. Degenkolb, a Platinum EERI Subscribing Member, is a structural, earthquake, and forensics engineering firm with strong ties to EERI and a history of learning from earthquakes. Bartoletti has visited several regions following devastating earthquakes including the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, 1999 Taiwan Earthquake, 2001 Nisqually Earthquake, and the 2010 Maule Chile Earthquake. He has a passion for the business of structural engineering and growing engineering and leadership talent. In addition to serving as a member and past Chair of the EERI Shah Family Innovation Prize Committee, he is a past Chair of the Coalition of American Structural Engineers (CASE) and a Founding Member and Board Member of Engineering Change Lab (ECL).

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. 

Vice President & Director
Term: 2026 & 2023-2026

Biography: Ashley Morales-Cartagena is a geotechnical engineer and disaster risk reduction professional with over 15 years of experience working across academia, industry, government, and international development. She is the founder and president of GeoRisk Consulting and a professor and researcher at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) in the Dominican Republic, where she previously served as Director for four years and founded the EERI PUCMM Student Chapter. She previously led the Disaster Risk Management and Geotechnical Engineering Departments at the Dominican Republic’s National Bureau of Seismic Evaluation and Infrastructure Vulnerability (ONESVIE). She has also served as an international consultant for organizations including UNESCO, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. Ashley co-chaired the EERI Younger Members Committee from 2019 to 2021 and received the EERI Younger Member Award in 2018. She was also recognized as one of the ASCE New Faces of Civil Engineering (2019). She holds an MS in Geotechnical Engineering as a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MS in Construction Management from INTEC, and a BS in Civil Engineering from PUCMM.

Director
Term: 2026-2029

Biography: Dr. Henry V. Burton is an Associate Professor and the Presidential Chair in Structural Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research areas include performance-based earthquake engineering, nonlinear structural analysis, and urban seismic resilience. Dr. Burton is a registered structural engineer in the state of California. Prior to obtaining his PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, he spent six years in practice at Degenkolb Engineers, where he worked on numerous projects involving design of new buildings and seismic evaluation and retrofit of existing buildings. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Next Generation of Disaster Researchers Fellowship (2014), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2016), and the Structural Engineering Association of Southern California (SEAOSC) S.B. Barnes Research Award (2024). Dr. Burton has been an active member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) for over 15 years in many roles including President of the EERI Stanford Student Chapter and serving on the organzing committees of both the 11th and 13th U.S. National Conferences on Earthquake Engineering.

Director
Term: 2026-2029

Biography: Emel Seyhan is a Director in the Analytics & Modeling Department at Moody’s (formerly RMS), where she leads the Earthquake Ground Motion and Site Response Modeling Team based in Newark, California. Over the past decade, she has developed catastrophe hazard and risk model projects across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania—transforming how seismic risk is quantified and managed in the global reinsurance and brokerage sectors. Her strategic leadership has helped shape Moody’s global risk assessment capabilities. Emel holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UCLA and is widely recognized for her contributions to the NGA-West 2 ground motion and site response models. She has authored over ten journal publications (2013–2024), served on the Seismic Design Competition Committee (2010-2012), taught as part-time faculty at California State University, Long Beach (2020-2022) and recently retired from the EERI Northern California Chapter Board of Directors. She is an active member of the USGS and New Zealand NSHM GMCM Technical Advisory Group. She remains involved in research beyond her professional role, including contributions to the NGA-West 3.