MMI’s Caroline Field, who recently joined the firm as Resilience Practice Leader, will be presenting at The Institution of Structural Engineers’ Technical Lecture Series in London next Thursday (29th June).

Engineering for the Future – a Resilience Based Approach

Climate change, political instability, aging populations, mass migrations, urbanisation and the exponential acceleration of technology are all driving a future of greater volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. If we are to plan and create a built environment that will last, we need to incorporate principles of resilience into everything we do. We need to plan for the best reasonable view of the future condition and not just meet the immediate needs of today.

How does the engineering industry and specifically structural engineering need to adapt its approaches? Caroline will discuss whether modern building design is appropriate for the uncertain future we face. Do we have confidence that our codes will provide a building that will last for 50 years or more? It is likely that structures will face loads larger than those designed for due to the effects of climate change and other stressors. What will be the effect of automation, AI and 3D printing on our industry? What do we need to do now to prepare?

Caroline will outline an alternative approach to resilience including a risk based methodology that has been applied at city, community and building level. This considers the concepts of redundancy, robustness and fail-safe; understanding what happens if our buildings exceed their design loads to ensure that our designs are fit for an uncertain future. She will also introduce the concept of Adaptive Capacity and how engineering solutions need to interface with response, recovery and learning to create a holistic resilience approach.

Find out more about MMI’s Resilience offering by clicking here.

Caroline Field – Bio

Caroline Field is a Principal Engineer with more than 20 years of experience in engineering consultancy for the built environment. Caroline currently leads MMI’s Resilience Practice Area; helping clients develop risk-based, comprehensive approaches to resilience. Her approach balances physical mitigations with adaptive capacity, consider shocks and stresses, social and economic factors, and incorporates future-trends analysis.

She is a structural engineer by training with a Master’s Degree in Earthquake Engineering. She specialises in the field of structural resilience to extreme events (specifically earthquake, explosions and progressive collapse). She spent 12 years based in San Francisco increasing their resilience to earthquakes as well as working on many other projects across the United States increasing protection to bomb blast.

Caroline is active in developing resilience standards and approaches with industry organisations such as the ASCE Infrastructure Resiliency Division where she co-chairs the SPEED committee; the USGBC LA Resilience Committee and the British Standards Institute (BSI) City Resilience Standard where she is deputy-chair. Additionally, she is currently contributing to the ASCE Disproportionate Collapse Standards Committee and is co-author for the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Protective Design Guide.

Caroline is a Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Civil Engineers in the UK, a Member of the Register of Security Engineers and Specialists, a licensed professional engineer in California and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

You can contact Caroline by clicking here.