CEE Graduate Student Trevor Carey Awarded EERI FEMA NEHRP Graduate Fellowship

Trevor Carey, a doctoral candidate working with Prof. Bruce L. Kutter, won one of the two 2018-2019 Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI)/Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program’s (NEHRP) fellowships. The one-year fellowship, underwritten with funds provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is designed to foster the participation of capable individuals in working toward goals and activities of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. The award is no surprise to other faculty and students in the department as Trevor is known for his insightful dialogue, collaborative attitude, and passion for outreach.

Trevor’s research has been focusing on the broader field of validation of numerical tools towards reliably predicting liquefaction and its effects on infrastructure. He has been a key member of the international project LEAP (Liquefaction Experiments and Analyses Projects) which brings together three U.S. based universities, and numerous experimental facilities and numerical modelers from all over the world. Trevor has been the lead graduate student researcher for UC Davis and from that position he has taken on a range of diverse responsibilities: apart from designing, leading, and executing a series of centrifuge model tests at the Center for Geotechnical Modeling of UC Davis, he has been responsible for processing and analyzing all the experimental data from more than nine facilities. Trevor’s contributions range from developing instrumentation capabilities all the way to the statistical processing and handling of large datasets as well as presenting them in a way that is usable and can facilitate the extraction of conclusions and lessons for follow up tests.

Beyond his role as a researcher, Trevor has had an outstanding record of service, leadership, and outreach roles. Trevor has served as the President of the EERI Student Chapter of UC Davis, and has also been a member of the EERI Student Leadership Council as well as a member of the Graduate Student Council of the Civil and Environmental Department. Most notably, in his role as an outreach chair of the Geotechnical Graduate Student Society (GGSS), Trevor has led activities for K-14 groups to learn about geotechnical engineering and about graduate school.  One of the most unique outreach events he organized, and led with the help of 5 more graduate students, was to 30 UC Davis transfer students from different disciplines (computer science, and mechanical-, civil-, electrical-, chemical- and aerospace engineering). What Trevor managed to do was go beyond the standard outreach agenda and focused on developing demonstrations of the interaction among the different engineering disciplines required for testing at the centrifuge facility.

We are all truly proud of all of his accomplishments, grateful for his citizenship in the Department, and excited to see what the future holds for him!

Five Facts about Trevor:

• He earned his bachelor's and master’s degree from Oregon State University
• He’s a casual woodworker and is slowly building himself new furniture
• He has researched the combined multi-hazard effects of sequential earthquake and tsunami hazards on typical coastal bridges in the Pacific Northwest  
• His master’s degree is in structural engineering
• In March of 2018 Trevor whitewater rafted the Colorado River through Grand Canyon NP as part of a course at UC Davis that teaches the translation from science to public policy.