Mary Comerio
Mary Comerio is an internationally recognized expert on disaster recovery. She joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture at U. C. Berkeley in 1978. As an architect, she has designed numerous public and private facilities including market rate and affordable housing. In the last two decades, her research has focused on the costs and benefits of seismic rehabilitation for existing buildings (particularly housing), post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, and loss modeling. She has published widely on these topics, including a book, Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery, (U. C. Press, 1998), and articles such as "Paying for the Next Big One" (Issues in Science and Technology, National Academy of Sciences, 2000), and "Public Policy for Reducing Earthquake Risks: a US Perspective" (Building Research and Information, Vol. 32, No. 5, 2004).
Prof. Comerio was the principal investigator on the pilot study for the Disaster Resistant University Initiative funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. The research on the economic impacts of disaster losses on the University of California, Berkeley campus was published in 2000, along with a strategic plan for risk management. In 2004, she completed a study of the impacts from contents losses in science laboratories with colleagues at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center. She is currently working on downtime modeling for the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering methodology.
Prof. Comerio holds a Master of Architecture and a Master of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis.
Disaster Resistant University Publications are available on the web:
Strategic Plan for Loss Reduction and Risk Management, June 2000
Seismic Protection of Laboratory Contents, IURD Working Paper 2003-02
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Last modified: Wed Sep 14 14:39:24 PDT 2005