16WCEE at Santiago, Chile

The 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering was held at Santiago, Chile during January 09-13, 2017. The conference was hosted by The Chilean Association of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering, ACHISINA (http://www.achisina.cl), under the auspices of The International Association for Earthquake Engineering, IAEE, (http://www.iaee.or.jp). ACHISINA was created in 1963 as a consequence of the Mw 9.5 earthquake that occurred in southern Chile in 1960.  The theme of this edition of the WCEE was ‘Resilience - the new challenge in earthquake engineering’.

President of IAEE, Prof. Sudhir K. Jain (Director IIT-GN), welcomed the conference participants through a video message (http://www.nicee.org/SKJ_speech_at_WCEE.mp4). In his address, Prof. Jain highlighted the deep impact these World Conferences have had on the practice of earthquake engineering and in enhancing seismic safety around the globe. He particularly extolled the efforts of the host country, Chile, in achieving a level of seismic safety through engineering solutions during the last 5 decades which has resulted in far fewer deaths in the recent major earthquakes.

The conference attended by more than 2,500 delegates from all around the world, saw discussions on wide-ranging issues concerning the improvement of earthquake resilience of communities.

More than 50 research papers were presented by the Indian delegates and about the same number attended the conference. Among the Indian academicians at the conference were: C. V. R. Murty, and A. Menon from IIT-M; Hemant Kaushik, Sandip Das, Abhishek Kumar and S.K. Deb from IIT-G; Ravi Sinha and Meera Raghunandan from IIT-B; T.K. Datta, B Matsagar, D.R. Sahoo and from IIT-D; M.L. Sharma (President ISET) , R.N. Dubey, B.K. Maheshwari, D. Shanker, M.N. Viladkar, N.K. Samadhiya from IIT-R; P.K. Ramancharla from IIIT Hyderabad, S. Suriya Prakash, and S. N. Somala from IIT-H; Manish Kumar from IIT-GN,  Keya Moitra from IIEST Shibpur and Durgesh C Rai from IIT-K (Coordinator, NICEE) besides many others. The participation of research scholars and doctoral students from various IITs was heartening and promising.

The proceedings of all previous 15 world conferences are hosted by NICEE (http://www.nicee.org/wcee/). The proceedings of this 16th World Conference will also become available soon.

The next WCEE will be held in 2020 in Sendai, Japan.