[ALOUD] at Central Library
Thursday, January 22, 2009 7:00 PM
THINKING ABOUT EARTHQUAKES:

A Panel Discussion

 
Moderated by Judith Lewis, editor, The L.A. Earthquake Sourcebook

It's been 15 years since the 1994 quake. Is L.A. more prepared for the next one? Are WE? A panel of experts air their views: Mariana Amatullo, director, The L.A. Earthquake: Get Ready project at Art Center College of Design; Michael Dear, Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at USC; Lucy Jones, Caltech and USGS seismologist; Dennis Mileti, Director of the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center; David Ulin, author, The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith.

Judith Lewis is a senior editor at the LA Weekly, where her writing on technology, the arts, natural resource issues, public health and the environment has appeared since 1991. Her work also appears in High Country News, WIRED, Salon, Sierra Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. She won a first-place Los Angeles Press Club award for her technology column, "Close to the Machine" and an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies award for her reporting on nuclear power and global warming. She is a member of the Society for Environmental Journalists, and is currently at work on a lay person's guide to nuclear energy.

Mariana Amatullo, co-founder and director of the College-wide initiative Designmatters, is the Vice President of the International Initiatives Department of Art Center College of Design, based in Pasadena, California. Through her leadership, Art Center is the first design institution to be formally affiliated with the United Nations as a non-governmental organization (NGO) and has become recognized with numerous public and private agencies as an exemplary effort uniting humanitarian, social and educational objectives. Mariana acted as the Director of The Los Angeles Earthquake: Get Ready Project.
Dr. Lucy M. Jones has been a seismologist with the US Geological Survey and a Visiting Research Associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech since 1983. She is currently serving as the Chief Scientist for the Multi Hazards Initiative in Southern California, developing a new program to integrate hazards science in urban areas with economic analysis and emergency response to increase community resiliency to natural disasters. She is also a Commissioner of the California Seismic Safety Commission, which advises the governor and legislature on seismic safety and she serves on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council. Dr. Jones has authored over 80 papers on research seismology with primary interest in the physics of earthquakes, foreshocks and earthquake hazard assessment, especially in southern California. Dr. Jones is the recipient of numerous awards for her work.
Michael Dear is Professor of Geography and Urban Planning at the University of Southern California, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London. He has been a Guggenheim Fellowship holder as well as Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. His book The Postmodern Urban Condition was selected by Choice magazine as an "Outstanding Academic Title." His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, La Opinion, the Times Literary Supplement, and National Geographic.
David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

Dr. Dennis S. Mileti is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and as Director of the Natural Hazards Center—the United States' clearinghouse for social and behavioral science research on hazards and disasters. He is author of over 100 publications, primarily discussing the societal aspects of hazards and disasters. He was the founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the all-hazards, all-disciplines journal the Natural Hazards Review.

He has served on a variety of advisory boards including the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Expert Advisory Panel for the study of evacuation of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, and the American Society of Civil Engineers Expert Panel overseeing the Army Corps of Engineers assessment of the New Orleans levee failures and consequences--he was given the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal in 2007 for that work by the Department of the Army.