Emily So
Emily So is a chartered civil engineer who has worked in practice, teaching, and research for 10 years. She is internationally recognized for her research on human casualties in earthquakes. Over the past five years, she has been on six post-earthquake field missions, assessing building damage and interviewing survivors. She recently led a UK mission to Samoa in 2009.
So spent six years at Arup in London as a geotechnical engineer where she worked mainly on geo-seismic projects, dynamic foundation analysis, and general geotechnical analysis. She was involved in numerous seismic hazard and site response assessments worldwide. She joined USGS as a Mendenhall Fellow in February 2010 and is now working with USGS PAGER system, developing and improving the empirical and semi-empirical building damage and fatality loss functions.
So completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture in 2009. Her Ph.D. research was on modeling of human casualties in earthquakes, examining current approaches to estimating fatalities and injuries, and proposing ways of improving data collection and modeling techniques. As director of Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd, So has consulted on many insurance projects, examining loss estimation and assessing uncertainties of earthquake losses.
Workshop Abstracts
Monitoring and Evaluating Recovery Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery: Toward Standardized Indicators for Post-disaster Recovery
With John Bevington, Keiko Saito, Daniel Brown, Beverley Adams, Steve Platt, Torwong Chenvidyakarn, Robin Spence, Ratana Chuenpagdee, and Amir Khan