My research is broadly focused on improving the resilience of urban regions to natural disasters. Specific areas of interest include (1) developing enhanced earthquake resistant building systems, (2) performance-based life-cycle design and assessment, (3) modeling the relationship between the performance of infrastructure systems within the built environment, and the ability of communities to minimize the extent of socioeconomic disruption following extreme events such as major earthquakes. This work relies heavily upon large-scale experimental testing, high-performance computing for structural simulations and advanced probabilistic methods. Current major research projects include (1) developing a post-disaster recovery model for residential communities (NSF Award Number 1538747), (2) utilizing remote sensing to assess the implication of tall building performance on the resilience of urban centers (NSF Award Number 1538866) and (3) developing a rocking wall-frame system as a cost-effective strategy for new design and seismic retrofit of concrete buildings. I joined UCLA’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering after completing my PhD in Civil/Structural Engineering at Stanford University. I have significant industry experience and am a registered structural engineer (S.E.) in the state of California. I spent six years in practice at Degenkolb Engineers where I worked on a number of projects involving seismic design, evaluation and retrofit of existing buildings.