William B. Joyner Memorial Lectures
The William B. Joyner Memorial Lectures were established by the Seismological Society of America (SSA) in cooperation with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) to honor Bill Joyner's distinguished career at the U.S. Geological Survey and his abiding commitment to the exchange of information at the interface of earthquake science and earthquake engineering, so to keep society safer from earthquakes. Joyner Lecturers are chosen on the basis of their work at this interface, whether they are contributions from earthquake science to earthquake engineering or from earthquake engineering to earthquake science.
Joyner Lectures are normally presented at the annual meetings of SSA and EERI. However, in 2006 the Joyner Committee decided that the "official" debut of the Joyner Lecture, "The Seismology-Engineering Interface: The Need for Two-Way Flow of Information," would be November 20, 2006, the 100th anniversary of the first meeting of the Seismological Society of America, at Pacific Gas & Electric Company in San Francisco.
Nominations for the Lectureship
Nominations for the Joyner Lecturer should be sent to the Joyner Committee, Seismological Society of America, 201 Plaza Professional Building, El Cerrito, CA 94530 by 1 July of each year. Nominations can be made by any current member of EERI or SSA. A nomination must clearly document what the nominee has done to foster and enhance communication at the earthquake-science/earthquake-engineering interface and why it makes a difference. The Joyner Lecturer will be selected by the Joyner Committee by 1 October each year. Each Joyner Lecturer will provide a written version of the lecture suitable for publication in Earthquake Spectra and Seismological Research Letters. EERI and SSA will waive meeting registration fees for the Joyner Lecturer and provide travel funds to attend the annual meeting of each organization.
The Joyner Committee
The Joyner Lectures are underwritten by the SSA William B. Joyner Memorial Fund, which is administered by the Joyner Committee. The Joyner Committee presently consists of Lloyd Cluff (chairman), David Boore, Thomas Hanks, Paul Somerville, and the Presidents of SSA and EERI, Bill Ellsworth and Thalia Anagnos, respectively.
Joyner Lecture Recipients
2009: Robin McGuire
Robin K. McGuire, Founder and President of Risk Engineering Inc., has been selected as the 2009 Joyner Lecturer. He will deliver his lecture at the SSA 2009 Annual Meeting, to be held in Monterey, California. McGuire, a Past-President of SSA, has spent his career working at this science-engineering interface. He first developed and published many of the methods taken today as requirements for advanced probabilistic seismic risk analysis, including: probabilistic analysis at multiple frequencies to calculate a uniform hazard spectrum, development of epistemic uncertainties in parameters such as maximum magnitude, treatment and mapping of epistemic uncertainties, derivation of a random-vibration model to predict earthquake ground shaking, deaggregation of seismic hazard to identify major contributors to hazard, and concepts of seismic risk to a lifeline system, rather than to an aggregate set of sites.
2008: Chris Poland
Chris Poland was the Joyner Lecturer for 2008. He is Chairman and CEO of Degenkolb Engineers, one of the nation's leading structural engineering firms. His research has contributed to the development of federal standards for seismic evaluations and mitigation for all federal buildings and numerous guidelines related to earthquake hazard reduction activities such as the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Series Program (NEHRP) handbooks for the seismic evaluation of existing buildings. He has participated in numerous policy-changing research projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Engineering. His Joyner Lecture is entitled "Transparent Seismic Mitigation for Community Resilience."
2007: Gail Atkinson
Gail Atkinson was the Joyner Lecturer for 2007. She is Professor of Geophysics at University of Western Ontario and has spent much of her career working at the engineering-seismology interface. She has authored more than 100 research articles on the subjects of earthquake ground motions and seismic hazards; among these are well-known prediction equations for ground-motion amplitudes as a function of magnitude and distance that have been used in national seismic hazard maps for both the United States and Canada. She is a past president of SSA and served as Chair of the SSA Eastern Section. Her Joyner lecture was entitled "Earthquake ground motions: The Myths and the Mysteries."
2006: Norm Abrahamson
Norm Abrahamson was the Joyner Lecturer for 2006, the Centennial Year of the San Francisco earthquake and the founding of the SSA. Norm brings a very pragmatic approach to ground-motion estimation, with a keen sense of what the engineering community needs to know and a remarkable ability, through his rapport with the seismological community, to obtain this information, whatever the issue may be. In recent years, Norm has contributed to the 1998 PSHA for Yucca Mountain and the Geological Survey's 2003 earthquake probabilities report for the San Francisco Bay area. His ongoing work includes extreme ground motions at Yucca Mountain and the new generation of attenuation models.
2005: Allin Cornell
The 2005 Joyner Lecturer was C. Allin Cornell. Allin is best known for original and continuing work on probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), now recognized for its great power in synthesizing earth-sciences data, models, and uncertainties in probabilistic portrayals. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is past President of the SSA (1989-1990) and received the Medal of the Seismological Society, now the Harry Fielding Reid Medal, in 2003. Allin has also been the EERI Distinguished lecturer (1999) and received the Housner Medal from EERI in 2003. Allin presented his Joyner Lecture, entitled "Quantifying the Seismology-Engineering Interface" at the EERI meeting in February, 2005, and at the SSA meeting in April, 2005.
2004: Lloyd Cluff
The first Joyner Lecturer, for the calendar year 2004, was Lloyd Cluff (see the article of the same title in Seismological Research Letters 75:2, p.153-154, 2004).