Research Expertise and Interest

multi-hazard risk analysis, reliability of critical infrastructure systems, climate adaptation and disaster resilience, structural engineering, extreme event modeling

Research Description

Luis Ceferino is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Ceferino's research group aims to extend the limits of what is feasible with catastrophe modeling and collaborate synergistically with researchers within and outside civil engineering to bring a new understanding of disaster risk in cities. His group combines rigorous structural modeling, uncertainty quantification methods, machine learning, and optimization techniques to elucidate the impact of extreme events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods on urban systems and strategize solutions for urban resilience. 

Ceferino has led international teams with environmental, civil, and electrical engineers and researchers in public health and also worked with the World Bank to study the risks of the housing, school, electricity, and hospital infrastructure to natural hazards in the United States, Nepal, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Peru. Ceferino also conducts post-disaster reconnaissance after multiple disasters, e.g., the 2016 Ecuador Earthquake, the 2022 Ian Hurricane, and the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake. 

Previously, Ceferino was an Assistant professor at New York University from 2021 to 2023 in the Civil and Urban Engineering Department and the Center for Urban Science and Progress. Before, Ceferino was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.