3/19/01

Mark Shwartz, News Service (650) 723-9296;
e-mail: mshwartz@stanford.edu

Luis Esteva to present the second annual Shah Family Lecture

Luis Esteva, professor emeritus of the Institute of Engineering at the National University of Mexico, will give the second annual Shah Family Lecture at 4 p.m. Friday, April 6, in Room 200 of the Teaching Center at the Science and Engineering Quad.

Esteva's lecture, titled "Toward Optimum Risk and Reliability Levels for Performance-Based Seismic Design," is presented by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is free and open to the public.

The Shah Family Fund was established in 1995 to provide annual fellowships for students in civil engineering; an annual prize for an outstanding staff member in the School of Engineering; and an annual distinguished lecture on catastrophic risk management and related subjects.

The fund is named for Haresh Shah, professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Shah, an expert on probability and reliability theory, also is a founding member of Risk Management Solutions Inc. in Newark, Calif.

Esteva, former dean of science at the National University of Mexico, is the author of numerous reports on earthquake engineering, seismic hazard and risk analysis, and structural reliability. He is president-elect of the International Association for Earthquake Engineering and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States.

Esteva has participated in the formulation of building codes and seismic regulations for Mexico and other countries, and has consulted on a variety of construction projects around the world.

For more information, contact Racquel Hagen in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at (650) 723-4150 or earthquake@ce.stanford.edu.

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By Mark Shwartz