Our People

Jennie Watson-Lamprey, PhD

Dr. Jennie Watson-Lamprey specializes in engineering seismology and development of site-specific seismic hazard analyses for dams, nuclear facilities, buildings, and critical infrastructure. She routinely develops site-specific design ground motions using probabilistic and deterministic approaches. She excels in the challenges of developing site-specific ground motion characterization in areas of low seismicity, in areas where ground motion prediction equations are not available, and incorporating the effects of directivity into Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA). Her ground motion selection practice includes linear scaling, spectral matching, and the selection of time histories for nonlinear dynamic analyses. Her risk practice includes the development of fragility curves to calculate the risk of seismic slope stability failure for large portfolios of earthen dams, and she is a key investigator on a multi-year project with UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, University of Nevada Reno, and UC San Diego to develop fragility curves for natural gas facilities. She has been a team member for Senior Seismic Hazard Analysis Committees (SSHAC) for numerous nuclear facilities in the Western United States.

Throughout her career, Jennie has endeavored to advance the state of practice. She was instrumental in the development of prediction equations that account for the effect of directivity over a range of magnitudes, distances, hypocenters, and rupture types in the Next Generation of Attenuation of Ground Motion (NGA) West 2 project. The resulting NGA West 2 ground motion prediction equations resulted in a major advance in the seismic hazard estimation for the western United States and are currently used for seismic analysis and design of buildings, bridges, dams, infrastructure, and critical facilities.