Recent earthquakes in the U.S. and around the world have repeatedly shown that earthquake resilience is essential to building and sustaining urban communities. Earthquake resilience will play an increasingly important role in the professions associated with earthquake hazard mitigation, thus there is a need to educate the next generation of these professionals. To address this need, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) coordinates a summer internship program for undergraduate students that focuses on the theme of earthquake-resilient communities. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), twenty interns from a variety of backgrounds and universities participated in the 2013 program.
The summer of 2013 represents the third year of funding from the National Science Foundation for this program. Since 2011, forty-three undergraduate students have conducted research with the support of a dedicated team of forty-nine faculty, post-doctoral, graduate student, and professional mentors. PEER students interns have come from 27 different universities, of which thirteen are primarily undergraduate serving institutions that have limited research opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math for their students. Forty percent of the interns have been women and 23% have been Hispanic or Latino. These statistics, gathered from program assessment surveys, show that PEER’s Internship Program is actively serving a broad range of undergraduates interested in earthquake engineering and earthquake mitigation by exposing them to unique and meaningful research programs in an array of technical disciplines.
Full List of PEER Reports: click here.
