My Profile

Contact Details

Institute Ribbons and Badges

Contact information, job title, education, and license are populated by the ASCE Membership database. You can edit your account here. Please allow 12 hours for the changes to appear in ASCE Collaborate. 

Prof. Keith Porter, Ph.D., P.E., F.SEI, F.ASCE





Bio

Dr Porter is a licensed Professional Engineer specializing in seismic vulnerability and loss estimation at the single-building and community levels. He developed a second-generation performance-based earthquake engineering methodology that measures probabilistic building performance in terms of dollars, deaths, and downtime. Dr Porter has over 25 years of professional and academic experience in catastrophe risk management, structural design, and construction contracting. He received his PhD from Stanford University, MEng from UC Berkeley, and BS from the University of California at Davis. He works as a private risk consultant and a research professor.

Leading consulting topics:

* Enterprise risk management. Make corporate disaster preparedness deeper than "drop cover and hold on." Identify cost-effective mitigation opportunities. Periodically review your facilities. Ingrain resilience into corporate procedures.

* Focus on critical facilities. Ensure that in the next N years, the chance that your EOC or distribution warehouse will experience damage that will cause it to become nonfunctional is less than a tolerably small amount.

* Maximize the reliability of facility networks. Ensure that a facility and its backup cannot both fail in the same event.

* Prepare for rapid paperless post-disaster response. Use the FEMA-funded mobile software Rapid Observation of Vulnerability and Estimation of Risk (ROVER) to speed post-disaster safety assessment and building reoccupancy.

Some leading research topics:

* Disaster scenarios. Scenarios offer unique opportunities to better understand the interaction between systems and to view disasters the way the public does.

* Lifeline earthquake engineering. Develop models that more accurately depict how lifelines perform and interact in earthquakes.

* Performance-based earthquake engineering. Improve our understanding of how earthquakes cause economic, life-safety, and functional impairment of buildings and other facilities.