Rebekah Paci-Green to Speak on Earthquake Risk Reduction in Nepal April 21

Western Washington University Assistant Professor Environmental Studies Rebekah Paci-Green will discuss earthquake risk reduction in Nepal at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 21, in Communications Facility Room 110 on the WWU campus.

The lecture is sponsored by Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment Speaker Series and is free and open to the public.

Paci-Green will present “In the Shadow of the Himalaya: Assessing Nepal’s Use of School Retrofitting as Catalysts for Earthquake Risk Reduction,” and discuss a framework for Nepal’s post-earthquake reconstruction based on her research team’s findings. Nepalese communities live on top of the world’s most active seismic zone, and for the last two decades, organizations have attempted make Nepalese school buildings more resilient to seismic activity. Three months after the Ghorka earthquake in April 2015, Paci-Green and her colleague, Bishnu Pandey, assessed many of these school buildings and compared them to similar buildings that had not been retrofitted.

Paci-Green is the director of Western Washington University’s Resilience Institute. She received her doctorate from Cornell University where she combined structural engineering and anthropology to study physical and social vulnerability and risk perceptions in informal districts of Istanbul, Turkey. In addition to her work in Nepal, Paci-Green has worked with community-based organizations in Washington state, Turkey, India, and Central Asia to develop and implement disaster risk-reduction education material.

The presentation will include a question-and-answer period. Anyone interested in the topic is encouraged to attend and participate.

The Huxley College Speaker Series, sponsored by Western’s Huxley College of the Environment, is intended to bring together environmentally-minded members of the WWU and Bellingham communities. Speakers address topics of contemporary environmental concern in the region and the world.

WWU’s Huxley College of the Environment is one of the oldest environmental colleges in the nation and a recognized leader in producing the next generation of environmental professionals and stewards. Huxley’s distinctive, interdisciplinary curriculum reflects a broad view of the physical, biological, social, and cultural world, and has earned international recognition for quality.

For more information, please contact WWU’s Huxley College of the Environment marketing coordinator, at (360) 650-2554 or Jen.VanderWeyden@wwu.edu.