Keith Porter, P.E., F.SEI, F.ASCE, a principal of the applied-research firm SPA Risk LLC, in Denver, and research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Porter has 30 years of scholarly and professional leadership in structural engineering, addressing how people, companies, and communities can protect themselves from natural disasters. He is interested in the risk of infrastructure to earthquake, fires, and storms, and leads the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves studies and the Resilience Incentivization Roadmap for the National Institute of Building Sciences. He led engineering aspects of the U.S. Geological Survey’s revolutionary ShakeOut, ARkStorm, Tsunami, and HayWired disaster planning scenarios. He also estimated costs and benefits of climate adaptation measures for the National Research Council of Canada, and seismic remediation in Central Asia for the World Bank.
Porter pioneered the development of second-generation performance-based earthquake engineering that undergirds FEMA P-58. He is a certified trainer for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) Saftey Assessment Program (SAP), teaching building professionals to assess the safety of buildings, utilities, and transportation infrastructure after earthquakes, floods, windstorms, and other disasters. He has written or co-authored 225 scholarly and professional works on natural-hazard risk management.
Prior to his current appointments, he worked at TY Lin International, EQE International, and the California Institute of Technology. Porter is a licensed California and Colorado professional engineer with civil and structural engineering degrees from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University.
