Dr Porter is a Caltech structural engineer, currently holding the title of GW Housner Senior Researcher. His expertise is in loss estimation, performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE), and multi-hazard risk management.
He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2000, for developing a second-generation PBEE methodology that estimates the future seismic performance of individual buildings in terms of dollars, deaths, and downtime. He hold BS and MEng degrees from UC Davis and UC Berkeley in civil and structural engineering, respectively. He has 8 years of professional engineering experience in construction contracting, structural design, and multihazard risk management.
Recent work includes development of global earthquake loss-estimation methods for the USGS
(http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/pager/), open-source risk management methods and software for the Alliance for Global Open Risk Assessment, PBEE tools for practitioners (http://www.atcouncil.org/atc-58.shtml), and end-to-end risk modeling methods for the Southern California Earthquake Center. He is the author of 60 scholarly publications, many of which can be found at http://keithp.caltech.edu.
