USC transportation expert to speak on economics and natural disaster

Jim Moore, professor of industrial and systems engineering; public policy and management; and civil engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), will be presenting a seminar on Wednesday, November 29 at 1 p.m. in Dunstan 202. The topic will be quantifying economic losses from travel that must be cancelled following a large metropolitan earthquake. The university community is invited to attend.

The goal of Moore's research is to help transportation officials plan and enable retrofit and reconstruction of metropolitan transportation networks. The work builds on work completed during the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) Highway Demonstration Project by developing a model capable of estimating the economic losses associated with trips eliminated following an earthquake. The new results dovetail with those of related projects funded by the Federal Highway Administration and the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER).

Moore received his bachelor's degrees in industrial engineering and urban planning from Northwestern University in 1981. He received a master's degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University in 1982, a master's in urban and regional planning from Northwestern in 1983, and a doctorate in civil engineering from Stanford in 1986. He specializes in transportation engineering, transportation systems, and other infrastructure systems, and is director of the transportation engineering program, co-director of the construction management program and chair of the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in USC's Viterbi School of Engineering.