Dr. Keith Porter, PE, PhD is a professional engineer, principal of the Denver applied research firm SPA Risk, and Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Western University and Adjunct Professor at University of Colorado, Boulder. His work involves helping nations, communities, and corporations improve their disaster resilience. He led the Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves studies for FEMA and others that found that disaster mitigation avoids up to $13 in losses per $1 of cost. He led the USGS’ engineering research on four groundbreaking disaster planning scenarios: ShakeOut, ARkStorm, Tsunami, and HayWired. He led the safety assessment of San Francisco’s soft-story residential buildings for the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS).

Dr. Porter is Chief Engineer in the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR) is a world-class centre for multi-disciplinary disaster prevention research and communication. ICLR was established by Canada’s property and casualty (p&c) insurance industry as an independent, not-for-profit research institute affiliated with Western University.