Jeremy Isenberg will present a civil engineer's perspective on homeland security at the Blume Lecture on April 7

Engineer Jeremy Isenberg will discuss the role of civil engineering in homeland security when he delivers the fifth annual John A. Blume Distinguished Lecture at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in the Tresidder Union Oak Lounge at Stanford University. The lecture, "A Rational Defense Against Irrational Acts: Civil Engineering Aspects of Homeland Security," is free and open to the public.

Isenberg is president and CEO of Weidlinger Associates Inc., a civil and structural engineering and software development firm with offices in the United States and Scotland. An authority on blast effects on structures who earned a bachelor's degree in structural engineering at Stanford, Isenberg has spent more than 25 years designing and evaluating computer models and field tests to strengthen structures against explosions, especially from terrorist attacks. Since Sept. 11, 2001, he has participated on several panels convened by the National Research Council, including a blue ribbon panel on bridge and tunnel security.

In his lecture, Isenberg will discuss how technology offers a means for rational defense against irrational acts. He will explain how Cold War technology developed to protect the military was extended to America's civil infrastructure in the aftermath of the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut and the subsequent attacks on the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building a decade later.

According to Isenberg, the current role of technology in protecting the civil infrastructure—bridges, tunnels and buildings—against terrorism is to support large-scale, highly visible projects with economical designs and retrofits, and to help infrastructure owners justify their choices to taxpayers concerned about safety and cost. He argues that 9/11 convinced some infrastructure owners to consider security in their capital budgets and to draw upon lessons learned by the earthquake engineering community.

The Blume Distinguished Lecture honors the late John A. Blume, a structural engineer whose career spanned more than 50 years and included many pioneering contributions to the field. Blume earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees at Stanford, and in 1976 helped launch the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center to promote earthquake engineering research on campus.

For additional information about the lecture, contact Racquel Hagen at the Blume Center at (650) 723-4150 or racquelh@stanford.edu. Additional information is available online at http://blume.stanford.edu.

-30-