Past Steve and Sylvia Burges Endowed Lectures

2023

Dr. Julian Marshall
UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Anti-racist air-quality modeling?
November 16, 2023

Ambient air quality in the US has improved over time, thanks to steps such as the 1970 Clean Air Act. However, in part because of where pollution sources are located, people of color in the US are still, on average, more exposed to air pollution than are white Americans. Today, society’s goals for air quality include not only improving conditions overall, but also addressing systemic disparities. Models and measurements are needed to focus attention on how to achieve that goal; research is needed to help propose and test possible solutions. This talk will discuss existing exposure-disparities and how researchers and practitioners can use data and models to better understand how to eliminate these disparities.

2022

Professor Emeritus Steve Kramer
UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Big, small, fast, slow: Geohazards I have known
May 20, 2022

Our landscape is always changing — on different spatial and temporal scales — and many of those changes can have profound effects on individuals and communities. Earthquakes and landslides are some of the most widely known and publicized geohazards, but other hazards related to geologic materials and processes can also lead to severe damage and loss. Unlike buildings and bridges, the sources of geohazards are generally not visible until their effects reach the ground surface; as a result, society is surprised over and over by their occurrence. Over the course of the past 44 years, the speaker has been involved with the investigation of a number of geotechnical failures - from landslides that traveled 100 feet to one that traveled 1,000 miles, and from residential homes that moved an inch to a 650-ft high-rise that settled and tilted sufficiently to rate a story on 60 Minutes. This presentation will examine a variety of geohazards with examples from the speaker's career in geotechnical engineering research and practice and show how geotechnical engineers are dealing with them.

2020

Professor Dorothy Reed
UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Reducing risk: Enhancing energy infrastructure resiliency
February 27, 2020

Civil infrastructure systems play an important role in community resilience. Often referred to as lifelines, these systems are comprised of about a dozen interdependent networks including electric power delivery, telecommunications, transportation, utilities and building support services. Modern society depends on these lifelines in order to function properly. In this talk, professor Dorothy Reed presents an overview of the resiliency of civil infrastructure with a particular emphasis on electric power delivery systems, based on research conducted individually and with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Center of Excellence at Colorado State University. One of the major results of this research is a set of geo-based numerical models that allow for uncertainty analysis. Reed will show how these models can be employed in a human-centric bottom-up approach to improve the risk modeling of electric power delivery.