EERI is excited to announce that Sabine Loos, University of Michigan, and Andrew Makdisi, USGS, are the new Co-Chairs of the Learning from Earthquakes Virtual Earthquake Reconnaissance Team (VERT).
EERI thanks founding VERT Co-Chairs Erica Fischer, Oregon State University, and Manny Hakhamaneshi, CA High-Speed Rail Authority, for their leadership of VERT since 2016. Under their leadership, hundreds of VERT volunteers contributed to over 35 VERT responses. VERT reports have served to inform LFE earthquake responses and informed the EERI membership of immediate earthquake impacts. VERT reports can be accessed in the LFE earthquake archive (https://learningfromearthquakes.org/archive/).
If you would like to participate in EERI’s response to earthquakes, VERT is a great way to contribute! Sign up as a VERT volunteer by completing the interest form.
More about the new VERT Co-Chairs:
Sabine Loos is an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she leads the Actionable Information for Disasters and Development (AIDD) Labs—a transdisciplinary group spanning engineering, urban planning, geography, and data science. Her research applies data fusion, human-centered design, and risk analysis techniques to produce disaster risk information that supports equity-focused interventions both in the U.S. and internationally. To translate research into practice, she partners with organizations including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the World Bank, and the Government of Nepal. Her work has been recognized with the 2024 Jose Maria Sarriegi Catastrophe Research Award and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. She serves as Executive Guest Editor for the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction's special issue on equity-centered risk assessment, co-founded the Risk & Resilience DAT/Artathon, and co-organized the Understanding Risk Climate Data Field Lab. Prior to Michigan, she was a Mendenhall Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey in collaboration with the Natural Hazards Center. She holds a PhD from Stanford University (with research at the Earth Observatory of Singapore), an MS from Stanford, and a BS from Ohio State University.
Andrew Makdisi is a research civil engineer at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geologic Hazards Science Center in Golden, Colorado. Andrew’s work deals broadly with seismic hazard and risk analysis and mitigation, with specific focuses on seismic hazard and risk modeling to develop engineering design criteria, development of probabilistic methods to forecast earthquake ground failures, use of physics-based numerical models to evaluate liquefaction hazards and other engineering demands, and characterization of strong ground motion for engineering impacts analysis. As part of the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, Andrew contributes to the National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) and Engineering and Risk project teams, where he was one of many co-authors on the 2023 USGS NSHM 50-state update and is engaged in ongoing seismic risk research work and collaborative efforts to adopt the NSHM into various seismic design guidelines. Andrew received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2012, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington in 2016 and 2021, respectively. During his doctoral studies he was an EERI/FEMA NEHRP Graduate Fellow in Earthquake Hazards Reduction during the 2019-2020 academic year, and participated in the EERI Learning From Earthquakes Travel Study Program in New Zealand in 2019.
