CEE's Dr. Greg Baecher to Deliver Plenary Lecture at SUNY Buffalo

Press Release

For release March 1, 2010

It was announced today that Professor Gregory Baecher of the Department’s Center for Excellence in Project Management will deliver a plenary lecture to the SUNY Buffalo Seminar on Reliability and Risk Analysis in Civil Engineering on April 27, 2010.

The State University of New York at Buffalo is a leading center in the United States for research on risk and reliability issues in civil engineering. SUNY hosts a National Science Foundation center on earthquake engineering (NCEES), and is widely known for research on structural and geotechnical engineering related to infrastructure risk.

Dr. Baecher’s lecture will be entitled Tolerable Risk for Flood and Coastal Protection. He will discuss his experiences as part of the Interagency Performance Assessment Task-force on Katrina, the Delta Risk Management Study in California, and various dam safety projects in Canada and Scandinavia.

Dr. Baecher is Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His professional work deals with risks associated with civil infrastructure, particularly facilities related to water resources management and flood protection. For the past three years he has been part of the federal interagency effort to understand the behavior of the hurricane protection system of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and continues to advise the US Army Corps of Engineers on recon-struction plans and levee safety. He also advises the Canadian hydropower industry on dam safety. Dr. Baecher was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

Published April 5, 2010