EERI is pleased to welcome Keith Knudsen and Ashley Morales-Cartagena to the Board of Directors! Both were selected by the 2022 Nominating Committee from the applicants for the Appointed Director board positions last fall, and appointed at the December 2022 Board Meeting. Keith Knudsen will serve a 2-year term, and Ashley Morales-Cartagena will serve a 4-year term. They will begin their terms in March 2023.
Keith L. Knudsen (M.EERI 2001) 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.
Ashley Morales-Cartagena (M. EERI 2015) 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.
