Academic background: GW Housner Senior Research Fellow, Caltech; PhD, Stanford University 2000; MEng, UC Berkeley 1990; BS, UC Davis 1987. Dr Porter has 16 years of experience assessing earthquake and hurricane risk for insurers, commercial and institutional building owners, and local governments. He has developed and applied a second-generation performance-based earthquake engineering methodology to assess probabilistic risk in terms of repair costs, casualties, and loss of use ("dollars, deaths, and downtime"). He is the author of over 50 scholarly and professional publications on multihazard risk.