Charles Scawthorn

Charles Scawthorn is a retired professor of infrastructure risk management and head of the Earthquake Disaster Prevention Systems Laboratory at Kyoto University. He is currently a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and principal of SPA Risk, LLC. He is a founder of the Global Alliance for Disaster Research Institutes and serves on its board of directors.  He specializes in the reduction of natural and technological risk and has research interests in stochastic simulation, portfolio and enterprise risk management, and fire following earthquake.

From 1998 to 2003, Scawthorn led technical development of the U.S. National Flood Loss Estimation Model (HAZUS) for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and is widely recognized for the development of methods for rapid risk analysis of buildings (FEMA 154), seismic vulnerability assessment of U.S. national infrastructure (FEMA 224), stochastic models of fires following earthquakes, models for optimizing urban land use with respect to natural hazards risk, general loss estimation models for earthquake, wind and flood, and seismically reinforcing low-strength masonry buildings. He is the author or co-editor of a number of books and technical papers on earthquake engineering, fire following earthquake, catastrophe risk and human casualties. Scawthorn is a graduate of the Cooper Union and holds an Master of Science in Civil Engineering degree from Lehigh University and PhD from Kyoto University.