Keith Porter, Ph.D.
Chief Engineer at Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction
Dr. Keith Porter serves as chief engineer of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, principal of SPA Risk LLC in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and adjunct professor at Western University and University of Colorado Boulder. He does pure and applied structural engineering research into how to make the built environment better serve people and society by better resisting metal disasters. He works with economists, sociologists, earth scientists, geographers, and others with similar interests.
He led the NIBS Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves studies and the engineering for the US Geological Survey’s ShakeOut, ARkStorm, Tsunami, and HayWired disaster planning scenarios. He helped to pioneer the performance-based earthquake engineering methodology underlying FEMA P-58.
Through FEMA’s National Technical Assistance Program (NETAP) and Cal OES’s Safety Assessment Program, he trains building professionals to do pre- and post-disaster building safety assessment, much of the training pro bono for Colorado. He has authored 250 publications on disaster risk management.
He is a licensed professional engineer with degrees from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University and a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Structural Engineering Institute.
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