Haresh C.
Shah
Thalia Anagnos
Roger D. Borcherdt,
Interviewers
Haresh C. Shah
Haresh C. Shah
Thalia Anagnos and Roger D. Borcherdt
Interviewers
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
Book Design and Production: George Mattingly, Berkeley, California, www.mattinglydesign.com
Series Design: Laura Moger, Moorpark, California, www.lauramoger.com
Copyright © 2025 by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
The publication of this book was supported by FEMA/U.S. Department of
Homeland Security under grant EMW-2024-GR-05423.
All rights reserved. The moral rights of Haresh C. Shah and his interviewers whose words are
reproduced herein have been asserted. No part may be reproduced, quoted, or transmitted in any
form without the written permission of the executive director of the Earthquake Engineering
Research Institute. Requests for permission to quote for publication should include identification of
the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the oral history subject and do not necessarily reflect
the opinions or policies of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, or any funding agencies.
Published by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute
66 Franklin Street, Suite 300, Oakland, CA 94607
Tel: (510) 451–0905
E-mail: eeri@eeri.org
Website: http://www.eeri.org
EERI Publication Number: OHS-33
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-943198-56-9
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-943198-62-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shah, Haresh C. interviewee | Anagnos, Thalia interviewer | Borcherdt, Roger D. interviewer
Title: Haresh C. Shah / Thalia Anagnos and Roger D. Borcherdt, interviewers.
Description: Oakland, CA : Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, [2025] | Series: Connections:
the EERI oral history series ; 33 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This is
the thirty-third volume in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s series, Connections: The
EERI Oral History Series. EERI began this series to preserve the recollections of some of those who
have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake engineering. Significant, even revolutionary,
changes have occurred in earthquake engineering since individuals first began thinking in modern,
scientific ways about how to protect construction and society from earthquakes. The Connections
series helps document this important history. This volume features Haresh C. Shah, a pioneer in
the early development of seismic hazard and catastrophe risk models”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025005327 (print) | LCCN 2025005328 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780943198620 paperback | ISBN 9780943198569 pdf
Subjects: LCSH: Shah, Haresh C. | Civil engineers--United States--Interviews | Earthquake engineering
Classification: LCC TA140.S473 A5 2025 (print) | LCC TA140.
S473 (ebook) | DDC 624.092 [B]--dc23/eng20250417
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025005327
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025005328
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Table of Contents
The EERI Oral History Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Personal Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Chapter 1: Early Life in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
Chapter 2: Graduate School at Stanford . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9
Chapter 3: Choosing an Academic Career . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Chapter 4: Earthquake Engineering at Stanford . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 5: Risk Management Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Chapter 6: Leadership In Civil Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Chapter 7: International Earthquake Resiliency Efforts . . . . . . . . . 61
Chapter 8: Transforming NTU Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter 9: Giving Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Chapter 10: Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Photos of Haresh Shah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
87
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
v
The EERI Oral
History Series
This is the thirty-third volume in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s
series, Connections: The EERI Oral History Series. EERI began this series to preserve the
recollections of some of those who have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake
engineering. Significant, even revolutionary, changes have occurred in earthquake engineering since individuals first began thinking in modern, scientific ways about how to protect
construction and society from earthquakes. The Connections series helps document this
important history.
Connections is a vehicle for transmitting the fascinating accounts of individuals who were
present at the beginning of important developments in the field, documenting sometimes
little-known facts about this history, and recording their impressions, judgments, and
experiences from a personal standpoint. These reminiscences are themselves a vital
contribution to our understanding of where our current state of knowledge came from and
how the overall goal of reducing earthquake losses has been advanced. The Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute, incorporated in 1948 as a nonprofit organization to provide
an institutional base for the then-young field of earthquake engineering, is proud to help
tell the story of the development of earthquake engineering through the Connections series.
EERI has grown from a few dozen individuals in a field that lacked any significant research
funding to an organization with nearly 3,000 members. It is still devoted to its original goal
of investigating the effects of destructive earthquakes and publishing the results through
its reconnaissance report series. EERI brings researchers and practitioners together to
exchange information at its annual meetings and, via a now-extensive calendar of conferences and workshops, provides a forum through which individuals and organizations of
various disciplinary backgrounds can work together for increased seismic safety.
The EERI oral history program was initiated by Stanley Scott (1921–2002). The first nine
volumes were published during his lifetime, and manuscripts and interview transcripts he
left to EERI are resulting in the publication of other volumes for which he is being posthumously credited. In addition, the Oral History Committee is including further interviewees
vii
within the program’s scope, following the committee’s charge to include subjects who: 1)
have made an outstanding career-long contribution to earthquake engineering, 2) have
valuable first-person accounts to offer concerning the history of earthquake engineering,
and 3) whose backgrounds, considering the series as a whole, appropriately span the various
disciplines that are included in the field of earthquake engineering. Scott’s work, which he
began in 1984, summed to hundreds of hours of taped interview sessions and thousands of
pages of transcripts. Were it not for him, valuable facts and recollections would already have
been lost.
Scott was a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was active in developing seismic safety policy for many years
and was a member of the California Seismic Safety Commission from 1975 to 1993. Partly for
that work, he received the Alfred E. Alquist Award from the Earthquake Safety Foundation
in 1990.
Scott received assistance in formulating his oral history plans from Willa Baum, Director
of the University of California, Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, a division of the
Bancroft Library. An unfunded interview project on earthquake engineering and seismic
safety was approved, and Scott was encouraged to proceed. Following his retirement from
the university in 1989, Scott continued the oral history project. For a time, some expenses
were paid from a small grant from the National Science Foundation, but Scott did most
of the work pro bono. This work included not only the obvious effort of preparing for and
conducting the interviews themselves, but also the more time-consuming tasks of reviewing
transcripts and editing the manuscripts to flow smoothly.
The Connections oral history series presents a selection of prominent individuals in earthquake engineering who provide insights into the development of the field. The term “earthquake engineering” as used here has the same meaning as in the name of EERI—the broadly
construed set of disciplines, including geosciences and social sciences as well as engineering
itself, that together form a related body of knowledge and collection of individuals that
revolve around the subject of earthquakes. The events described in these oral histories span
many kinds of activities: research, design projects, public policy, broad social aspects, and
education, as well as interesting personal aspects of the subjects’ lives.
viii
Published volumes in
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Henry J. Degenkolb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1994
John A. Blume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1994
Michael V. Pregnoff and John E. Rinne . . . . . . . . . . . . 1996
George W. Housner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1997
William W. Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1998
Robert E. Wallace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1999
Nicholas F. Forell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2000
Henry J. Brunnier and Charles De Maria . . . . . . . . . . 2001
Egor P. Popov . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2001
Clarence R. Allen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2002
Joseph Penzien . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2004
Robert Park and Thomas Paulay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2006
Clarkson W. Pinkham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2006
Joseph P. Nicoletti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2006
LeRoy Crandall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2008
Vitelmo V. Bertero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2009
Robert V. Whitman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2009
Eric Elsesser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2010
William Anderson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2011
Roy G. Johnston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2012
Ugo Morelli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2013
George G. Mader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2014
William J. Hall, Nathan M. Newmark appendix . . . . . . 2015
Edward L. Wilson, Ray W. Clough appendix . . . . . . . . 2016
John F. Meehan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2017
Mete A. Sozen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2018
Mary C. Comerio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020
Roland L. Sharpe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2020
Anil Chopra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2021
Nigel Priestley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2021
Izzat M. Idriss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2024
Robert A. Olson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2025
Haresh C. Shah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2025
ix
EERI Oral History Committee
Thalia Anagnos, co-Chair
Laurie A. Johnson, co-Chair
Roger Borcherdt
Ayse Hortacsu
Elide Pantoli
Robert Reitherman
Charles Scawthorn
Tony Shakal
Loring A. Wyllie, Jr.
x
Foreword
Interview sessions among Haresh C. Shah, Thalia Anagnos, and Roger Borcherdt started
in September 2023 and continued through June 2024. The transcripts were created from
recorded Zoom interviews. From the beginning, we were honored to have the opportunity
to document the contributions of a distinguished and valued colleague that we had both
worked with over the years. We knew about Haresh’s contributions to the world of risk
analysis and loss estimation. However, as each interview revealed new surprises about the
breadth and diversity of his contributions in the realms of education, leadership, philanthropy, and societal wellbeing, we were in awe of his limitless empathy, energy and capacity
to do good.
Every aspect of this interviewing experience has been enlightening and fun. We are inspired
to follow Haresh’s lead in trying to make the world a better place.
Charles A. Kircher and Laurie A. Johnson reviewed the manuscript. Sarah Nathe copy edited
the manuscript. George Mattingly performed the page layout. Silvana Cobos, EERI Communications and Program Manager, managed the production process.
Thalia Anagnos
EERI Oral History Committee Co-chair
EERI Honorary Member
Roger D. Borcherdt
EERI Honorary Member
September 2024
xi
Personal Introduction
Haresh C. Shah is a special mentor, friend, and colleague, who has been an inspiration and
pleasure to work with throughout my career. I met Haresh after returning to the USGS in
Menlo Park in 1971, following my three-year diversion to UC Berkeley as a PhD engineering
student interested in the theory and measurement of soil response.
In the early 1970’s there were few maps depicting seismic risk and potential earth-science
hazards that could be used to improve public earthquake safety. Haresh and I shared
complementary interests in changing this situation. He approached the problem from
a structural engineering perspective with an emphasis on the built environment and its
vulnerability throughout the world. I approached the problem from a multidisciplinary
earth-science perspective with emphasis on potential earth-science hazards (PESH) such
as surface faulting, ground shaking variations, liquefaction, and landsliding throughout
California. These complementary aspects of our research and interests in public safety led to
our career-long interaction as friends and colleagues.
Haresh started his career in 1959 as a structural-engineering PhD student at Stanford after
arriving in the U.S. from India. He accepted a faculty appointment at the University of
Pennsylvania in 1962. Then, upon earning tenure, he returned to Stanford in 1968 to accept
a highly sought-after faculty position. This appointment was the beginning of his extraordinary leadership career at Stanford as an endowed Blume and Obayashi Professor, Civil
Engineering Department Chair, and a founding Director of the John A. Blume Earthquake
Engineering Research Center. During this time, he also founded Risk Management Solutions, Inc., served as co-chair of the World Seismic Safety Initiative, and as President of the
Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering.
Haresh’s vision and efforts to establish the Blume Center in 1974, in cooperation with Jim
Gere, and with the generous support of John Blume, have proven to be a very successful and
lasting contribution to earthquake engineering education. The center, with its outstanding
current director Gregory Deierlein, past directors, faculty, and students, is a vibrant and
productive environment for research.
Haresh’s many innovative contributions during his nine-year tenure as Civil Engineering
Department Chair include the establishment of the endowed Obayashi and Shimizu faculty
xiii
positions and the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE). CIFE has succeeded
in bringing together researchers, industry professionals, and students from around the
world to develop collaborative virtual design and construction solutions for major industry
projects. CIFE’s initial prototype for Building Informational Modelling (BIM) provided
the basis for an enthusiastic collaborative research environment that was evident to me
during my Shimizu Professor appointment at the Blume Center in 1991. This enthusiasm has
translated into CIFE becoming an integral part of engineering education at Stanford with a
current mission to be the “world’s premier academic research center for virtual design and
construction.”
Haresh proposed a Joint Stanford/USGS Center for Research in Earthquake Engineering
and Seismology. His visionary proposal facilitated cooperative projects and graduate student
access to earth science databases and GIS mapping resources. It led to his colleague Anne
Kiremidjian’s kind invitation for me to provide lecture notes on wave propagation for a portion of her CE-282A course. These lectures became the impetus for my textbook, Viscoelastic
Waves and Rays in Layered Media. The book is the culmination of a theoretical journey to
describe anelastic soil response in alluvial basins for purposes of site-specific design. It was
never imagined that it also would yield new insights for many of the basic anelastic problems
of seismology, exploration geophysics, and seismic tomography of the earth’s deep interior.
Without Haresh’s vision and Anne’s encouragement, the book to document this journey may
never have gotten started.
Haresh possesses many outstanding abilities. His special friend and colleague, the late
Helmut Krawinkler, indicated at Haresh’s retirement from Stanford that “his abilities to
motivate, persuade, and communicate are truly admirable. He beams energy and optimism,
and during his term as department chair he succeeded in infecting the whole department
with these attributes.”1 These skills were evident when I worked with him as co-chair for the
Fourth International Conference on Seismic Zonation. As EERI Vice President at the time, I
was asked by the board to invite him to chair the conference. Being a very busy professor, but
a clever and persuasive one, he agreed to serve, but only if I would be his co-chair. When the
steering committee discussed a luncheon speaker, Haresh was quick to offer to invite George
Shultz, whom he had recently met at a round table discussion with Mikhail Gorbachev of
the former Soviet Union. Shultz, who had just returned to campus after having served as
Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, accepted Haresh’s persuasive invitation.
His well-received speech generated considerable media attention. As one might surmise,
with Haresh’s leadership skills, the conference was a success, as attested to by a congratulatory letter from President Frank Press of the National Academy of Sciences, who served as
honorary chair, and a letter of achievement from EERI President Chris Poland.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake triggered several important milestones for public
safety. Being an earthquake with damages that exhibited a strong correlation with local
1 Johnson, T., 1997, Haresh’s Life, Haresh C. Shah Retirement Ceremony, John A. Blume Center
Archives.
xiv
soil conditions, it generated revisions in building codes to account for these effects with
new site coefficients and site classes defined in terms of soil shear-wave velocities (Vs30).
Whether it be these geologic effects or the resultant damages, this earthquake prompted
another important milestone: it inspired Haresh to establish Risk Management Solutions,
Inc. (RMS) under the stewardship of his son Hemant H. Shah and his doctoral graduate
Weimin Dong. This pioneering decision spawned a new risk management services industry
for the financial and insurance markets. Under their excellent stewardship, RMS grew
into a global catastrophe risk management corporation with offices on four continents and
hundreds of employees. It also comprised a subsidiary company of many thousand people
in India focused on GIS digital database development. The growth of RMS to a company
with published values that exceeded $1.5 billion is a testament to the vision and leadership of
Haresh, Hemant, and Weimin, as well as to the contributions of the many RMS employees,
Blume Center graduates, the RMS mission, and the need for its services.
The impact of RMS’s contributions is exemplified by Haresh’s receipt of The John S. Bickley
Gold Medal for Excellence Award in 2000 from the International Insurance Society “for his
sustained and outstanding contributions to the insurance industry.” And, what would make
any father proud, Hemant has been named Most Admired CEO (San Francisco Business
Times, 2014), one of the 100 Most Powerful People in the Insurance Industry (Insurance
Newscast, 2005–2011), Most Influential Person of the Year (Reactions Global Awards, 2011),
and one of the Top 40 Most Influential (Global Reinsurance, 2008).
Another important public-safety milestone, motivated in part by the Loma Prieta earthquake, is HAZUS (Hazards US). Its prototype was developed by RMS to provide rapid standardized estimates of earthquake losses for resource allocation by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency following damaging earthquakes. This initial prototype was developed
using state-of-the-art GIS mapping technology and up-to-date PESH and infrastructure
databases with guidelines from the nine-member Project Work Group chaired initially by
the late Robert V. Whitman and then by William Holmes. This software prototype set the
stage for what has become a standard for earthquake loss estimation worldwide, thanks to
the initial contributions of RMS and a long list of distinguished EERI members, some of
them being notable graduates of the Blume Center, such as Charles Kircher, Thalia Anagnos,
and Scott Lawson.
A public safety milestone on an international scale was established when the International
Association for Earthquake Engineering (IAEE) formally established the World Seismic
Safety Initiative (WSSI) with co-chairs Haresh Shah and Tsuneo Katayama. The WSSI
was established in 1992 as an IAEE action item for the International Decade for Natural
Disaster Reduction to facilitate reduction efforts in needy countries. Haresh’s admirable
ability to initiate and conduct meetings with leading officials including presidents and prime
ministers was readily apparent to those of us serving on the WSSI Board. These High-Level
Meetings were crucial for the implementation of hazard mitigation options appropriate for
each country’s resources and political situation. The success of the WSSI in more than 13
xv
countries with few or no previous risk reduction efforts is a true mark of Haresh’s dedication
and compassion for helping those in need.
Haresh’s contributions were especially evident at the celebration of his transition to emeritus
status at Stanford in 1997. Helmut Krawinkler remarked that “One measure of Haresh’s
success is the success of his students. His former doctoral students, a group of 44 bright
individuals, have attained leading positions in education, government, and industry. They
are a tribute to the outstanding quality of Haresh’s research program.”1 His contributions
are also evidenced by his honorary memberships in EERI and IAEE and his multiple awards
including the Alfred E. Alquist Medal, the ATC Top Seismic Engineer of the 20th Century,
and the EERI Housner Medal for his “extraordinary and lasting contributions to earthquake
safety worldwide through the development and application of earthquake hazard reduction
practices and policies.”
Those of us who participated in his retirement seminar suspected Haresh would continue
to pursue new ventures; however, his former PhD student and colleague Anne Kiremidjian,
put it best, “Haresh may be retiring from classroom teaching, but I am convinced he will
find new ways to teach, will continue to lead new ventures, and will always be involved in a
variety of professional activities.”1 She was correct, but I suspect none of us envisioned the
global impact these contributions would have on education or the ways in which Haresh
would help others.
After becoming a Stanford emeritus professor, Haresh assumed a number of leadership
positions at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, including Senior Academic Advisor to NTU’s President, Academic Reorganization and Governance Committee
Chair, NTU Board of Trustees member, and Academic Affairs Committee Chair. During his
tenures in these positions, a number of advancements were made at NTU.
Haresh’s coauthored book, Troika! The Remarkable Ascent of a Great Global University,
Nanyang Technological University Singapore, 2003–2017, tells the fascinating story of how
a leadership team of three (the “Troika”), Su Guaning, Haresh Shah, and Bertil Andersson
played a significant role in the rise of NTU from an academic ranking below 500 in 2003 to
one of the top universities in the world, while being the youngest university in Asia to achieve
this prestigious status. Among his contributions to NTU, Haresh founded the Institute of
Catastrophe Risk Management, which has now become Asia’s leading research institute in
the field to help those at risk in Asia as well as worldwide. In recognition of his contributions,
Haresh received in 2015 an Honorary Doctor of Letters from NTU, awarded personally by
the President of the Republic of Singapore, Tony Tan Keng. Another honor of which Haresh
is especially proud is the Singapore Pingat Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Medal) awarded
in 2014 for his valuable contributions to the Ministry of Education of Singapore.
Haresh somehow also found time to contribute to university education in Pune, India,
his childhood hometown. In recognition of his contributions as a senior advisor to the
president of the university, he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Symbiosis
International University in 2014. He also was honored with the Mahatma Gandhi Samman
xvi
Award presented in the House of Lords, London in 2014 for being an “Eminent Achiever” in
his profession.
Haresh’s humanitarian work stands out as an important part of his career and who he
is as a person. He was awarded the Bharat Gaurav Award in 2000 as one of the “Unsung
heroes across the country (India) who are working hard for the betterment of the lives of
the underprivileged.” A motto of the Bharat Gaurav Foundation describes Haresh’s work
very well: “Don’t work for recognition but do work worthy of recognition.” This statement is
exemplified by the Emelie Foundation established by the Shah family to improve education
of women in India, the RMS project to provide computers in rural schools, the development
of a rural mountain school, cooperative efforts with other philanthropic foundations, and
the Asia Risk Transfer Company to assist farmers during droughts.
Haresh’s philosophy that advancements in public safety are encouraged through innovation
and education is exemplified by his family’s generous contributions to multiple organizations. The Shah Family Fund, established at Stanford in 1995, provides annual fellowships for
civil engineering students, an annual prize for an outstanding School of Engineering staff
member, and an annual lecture on catastrophe risk management. The Shah Family Innovation Prize established at EERI in 1998 is awarded annually to individuals “for creativity,
innovation, and an entrepreneurial spirit in earthquake risk, mitigation, and management.”
The Shah Family Award/Prize established at NTU in 1996 is awarded annually to cultivate
student entrepreneurship in the NTU School of Civil & Structural Engineering.
Over the years, I often have had the privilege of enjoying the Haresh’s excellent hospitality
and that of his wonderful wife Joan. In each case, whether it be a wedding reception for one
of their remarkable sons Hemant and Mihir, or their own 50th year wedding anniversary,
the event is one of excellence, executed with gracious perfection.
Haresh C. Shah has established enduring legacies that continue to improve education and
public safety throughout the world. This oral history provides insights into Haresh as an
outstanding humanitarian with an extraordinary career that identifies him as the father of
earthquake risk management models for the insurance and reinsurance industries. These
insights are important contributions to the history of earthquake engineering and civil
engineering in general.
Roger D. Borcherdt
Scientist Emeritus, USGS
xvii
Haresh C. Shah
Chapter 1
Early Life in India
My father was always saying, “Haresh, in India we
need to build so many things. You need to be an
engineer.”
A Carefully Selected Marriage
Anagnos: Let’s start with where you grew up.
Shah: I was born in Godhra, August 7, 1937, but I grew up in
Pune.
Anagnos: Tell us about your family.
Shah: I come from a middle-class family in India. My father,
Chandulal, was from a very poor family and my mother, Ramangauri (or Rama for short), was from a rich family. My mother was
the only daughter, and her father was a Renaissance man. He
wanted his daughter to marry somebody who had a good future.
Anagnos: Chandulal, that’s your middle name.
Shah: Yes, in India, in my community our middle name is always
the father’s first name. I’m a son of Chandulal, so the middle
name is Chandulal. My brother’s middle name is also Chandulal,
Shashikant Chandulal Shah.
Anagnos: You were telling us about your mother and father.
Shah: My father was the only son, and my mother was the only
daughter. My maternal grandfather was very careful in selecting
1
Chapter 1
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
who was coming into his family. In spite of
not being rich, he selected my father as the
groom for my mother, and they got married in
Godhra. And true to my grandfather’s expectations, he made a good life for his family.
Life Under British Rule
Shah: My father was born in 1900. In those
days of British rule, the British Raj as we call
it, education for Indians was a privilege rather
than a right. Very few Indians, male or female,
went to school. However, my father graduated
from high school, which was in those days an
accomplishment, and he told my grandfather
that he was not going to stay in Godhra,
because there weren’t many opportunities.
He wanted to go to a big city where there were
more opportunities for growth. So, he decided
to move to Pune around the mid-1920s (it was
called Poona at that time). Bombay was India’s
main city in those days. But in summer, the
British Raj moved their administration from
Bombay to Pune because it is in the hills and
far cooler and less humid than Bombay.
India had four military commands, the
Eastern, Northern, Southern, and Western
Command. Pune was the headquarters of
Southern Command, which was the largest.
There were many British Officers as well as
British civilians and, administrators in Pune at
that time. My father thought that he would get
a better job with the British people if he moved
to Pune.
Anagnos: You haven’t mentioned your
mother. Did she move with him to Pune?
Shah: No. My mother and father had a
10-year age difference, and my mother was
2
married at a very young age, 15. There were no
children yet. He moved to Pune to look for a
job. She stayed in Godhra with her parents.
He found a job in a hotel, called the Napier
Hotel, where mainly Britishers who were
visiting Pune stayed. My father started his job
as a purchasing and supply manager for the
hotel. Most of the clients were British officers
and their families.
Many Languages Were Spoken
Anagnos: Before you go on, what was your
father’s first language? What language did you
speak at home?
Shah: His first language was Gujarati, but
his English was very good, and was proper
English, British English. He was an outgoing
person. Everybody knew him. They would talk
to him, and he would talk to them. He merged
into the environment at the Napier Hotel quite
well.
We all spoke Gujarati at home. As soon as we
stepped out of the house, it was English. Pune
is in the state of Maharashtra, and the language
spoken by the general population was Marathi.
So, I spoke in Marathi or Hindi with most
people. With colleagues, we spoke in English,
and at home, Gujarati. You don’t realize it
when you are a child that you are speaking
different languages. You just see a person and
start talking in that person’s language, and you
go shopping and start speaking in Hindi. One
sentence could be in Hindi, and the next could
be in English. Very natural.
Haresh C. Shah • Early Life in India
Growing Up in Pune
Was Beautiful
Anagnos: How did your father end up
owning a clothing shop?
Shah: There was a lady by the name of
Emelie who owned a shop named Emelie
Windro, Milliners, which was a hat makers and
designers of dresses for wives and children of
British Officers. She came to the Napier Hotel
often, so my father got to know her. In 1946,
a year before India’s independence, Emelie
decided to go back to UK and offered to sell her
business to my father. He acquired the business
in 1947 and renamed it Emelie, dropping the
word Windro.
By that time, my mother had come to Pune
from Godhra to join my father. My father
had a good steady job and was relatively well
settled. My parents bought a home in the
Central District of Pune, and very near the
Napier Hotel as well as near the Emelie store.
My eldest sister was born in 1926. I have four
sisters, and one brother. I am number six.
Anagnos: Were all six of you born in Pune?
Shah: In India the custom was that the
mother always went to her parents for delivery
of the child. So, even though my father was in
Pune, all six children were born in Godhra.
Anagnos: What kind of place is Pune?
Shah: Pune is a beautiful city, lots of parks,
gardens, and trees. When I left Pune in 1959 it
had about 600,000 people and today in 2023,
60 plus years later, there are 6 million people.
That’s 10 times more! This is partly because
it is one of the Silicon Valley hubs of India
together with Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Chapter 1
These are the three cities where all the software
and hardware companies are. Pune is known
for its car manufacturing, like the Mercedes
plant of South Asia. Also Pune has many small
industries, because of its good climate. When
India became independent, they created the
National Defence Academy in Pune to train
military personnel. For many reasons, Pune
was attractive to Indians and to industry, so it
grew very fast in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
In Pune there were two parts, one was Pune
Municipality, and the other was Pune Camp,
where the Southern Command Military
Headquarters was based. We lived in the Camp
area, which was clean, beautiful, green, and
with many parks. The British kept their Camp
area like they do in England, so we had many
grounds to play cricket. We would go hiking
and climbing. We would skate on the main
street at night; no traffic, no cars at night. To
this day, the Camp area is distinctly different
than the Municipality area.
As for growing up in Pune, it was the most
beautiful 19 years of my life. If I ever leave Palo
Alto, I’ll go to Pune. It’s that beautiful, even
now.
Education Was Very Important
Anagnos: Was school in India free, or did
your family have to pay for school?
Shah: My family was very education
oriented. We all were educated in private
schools. All four girls earned a college degree,
which was unusual in those days. For the boys,
my parents said, you keep going as long as you
do well. My brother got a degree in India, and
then came to the United States and earned
3
Chapter 1
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
a master’s degree. I went to the engineering
college and graduated, came to Stanford and
earned advanced degrees.
My father said, don’t worry about the money,
education is very important. My mother was
not too happy that we were going away, and
that we might not come back, but she was
happy that we were being educated. My family
was unique, because it was unusual to have
all the children, even the girls, fairly well
educated. My sisters were kind of a role model
for many other girls. Two of them became
teachers.
Surya, the sister just older than I am, got a
degree at Louisiana State University. She taught
in American schools, and then she established
her own school in Los Angeles. She was a pretty
entrepreneurial type.
Anagnos: What was school like?
Shah: Initially I went to the G. K. H. Mandal
School, which was a private school. Because of
his belief in the importance of education, my
father was the secretary of the board of trustees
of the school. That was a very important
position.
The medium of education at the school was
mainly Gujarati, except we all had to take
English courses. I did extremely well in the
school. Children and parents used to complain
that I was doing well because of my father
being an important person. One day my father
said I’m going to pull you out of the school
and send you to a bigger school in which the
medium of education is English. I want to see if
you do well there.
This was traumatic, because suddenly after
learning all my courses in Gujarati, I had to
learn, take exams, and everything in English.
I knew English quite well, but it was different
to study in English. My father sent me to
Dastur High School, a private school run by
Zoroastrians (they are called the Parsis). Most
of the students were Zoroastrians.
The last two years of high school I went to
this new school. Fortunately, even though the
initial three months were traumatic, I graduated with very good grades.
Borcherdt: Did you have any high school
teachers that motivated you to go into engineering or mathematics?
Shah: My main motivator was my father.
He was always saying, “Haresh, in India we
need to build so many things. You need to be
an engineer.” During the late 19th and early
20th centuries, the British Raj was building
the infrastructure of India with considerable
urgency. Roads, railroads, bridges, dams, and
canals were being constructed all over the
country. Besides British-educated engineering
military officers, most of the engineers needed
were Indians. They were educated in colleges
such as the College of Engineering, Pune
(established in 1854). There were quite a few
engineering colleges spread over India, but
not enough to educate the needed number of
engineers. IITs were not yet established.2
My father could see that most of the officers
who used to come to Napier’s were engineers.
He was impressed with them. “Wow! Look at
2 IIT Kharagpur, founded in 1951, was the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
4
Haresh C. Shah • Early Life in India
these people. They are building big bridges and
canals and railroads.” Then, like a good son, I
said, sure, I’ll be an engineer.
Anagnos: What kinds of things did you do
when you weren’t studying?
Shah: In middle and high school we all
played cricket, passionately. We would have
cricket matches between clubs from various
regions. We used to play games with the immediate neighborhood, which are Indian games.
One team had to be police, and the other team
had to be robbers. The robbers were on the
run, and the police had to find them, and arrest
one at a time. The way to arrest someone was to
throw some color on their body.
Anagnos: Did you ever help your father in
his shop?
Shah: My father never wanted me to do
anything in the shop. He said, I want you to
study. I want you to become either a doctor or
an engineer, and I want you to do good things.
So, we were not encouraged to work in the
shop. He was worried that if we joined him, we
would end up running the shop.
Indian Independence
Anagnos: I am curious about the independence of India in 1947, and what that was like
for you. I read in Anil Chopra’s oral history that
his family lived right on the border of what is
now Pakistan, and so for his family, it was quite
disruptive.3
3 Anil K. Chopra Connections, The EERI Oral History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Oakland, CA, 2021, pp 1–4.
Chapter 1
Shah: Because Gandhi was the main driver
of the nonviolent independence campaign, he’s
called the Father of the Nation. He was jailed
many times. In 1942, he was jailed in Pune
at the Agakhan Palace for two years. Pune
was always a center of agitation in support of
Gandhi. Always! Even ten to 15 years before
Independence there were frequent marches.
Gandhi being there, he would not allow
violence, but he would have Satyagraha, that is,
resistance without violence.
We were very much aware of what was going
on to resist the British, to tell them, it’s time for
them to go home. But we were not affected by
partition.4 We were too far from the so-called
border. At that time, they had a commission
appointed to draw the line, and these people
drew the line without knowing anything about
the communities. They just took a map and
drew the line. It just created havoc, and that
havoc displaced more than 10 million people.
Many died.
Never Experienced
an Earthquake in Pune
Anagnos: Pune is in a seismic region. Did
you experience any earthquakes? Did that have
anything to do with you being interested in
earthquake engineering?
Shah: I lived in Pune for 21 years, and I
never experienced a single tremor, never, not
even once. You know the Southern Peninsula,
called Deccan, is considered the most stable
region of India. Most of the earthquakes that
4 This refers to the partition of British India in August 1947, in which two independent nations were
formed: India and Pakistan.
5
Chapter 1
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
have occurred were after construction of a very
large irrigation project, not too far from Pune.
They built a huge dam, and it triggered events.
The area, which was relatively aseismic, or low
seismicity, became seismic. Since that big dam,
Pune had a few tremors, including the big one
in 1967.
Borcherdt: Is that the Koyna Dam?
Shah: Yes, and I have visited Koyna Dam.
Most of the earthquakes near Pune on the Deccan Peninsula occurred after the 1960s, when
the dam was built. In ’64, I think, there was a
drought, and there was a huge draw down of
the lake. Then in ’65, I think, there was a good
rain, and again filling up the dam, because that
area is surrounded by hills. It’s the Western
hills. This drawing down and filling it up may
have resulted in changing the seismicity of the
immediate region.
College of Engineering
at University of Pune
Anagnos: You went to the College of Engineering at University of Pune, what was the
education like there?
Shah: In the 1950s, when we finished high
school, we had to attend a college for the first
two years. At Wadia College, which was not
junior college, they also awarded bachelor’s
degrees, and master’s degrees, we learned
everything: general education, biology,
chemistry, mathematics, science, statistics,
you name it. Then there is a very competitive,
very difficult general exam. Those who were
inclined to go to medical school took a special
exam for medical school. Those who were
6
inclined to go into engineering, they took a
special exam for engineering.
There were no IITs at that time. The important
engineering schools were Pune, Roorkee,
Banaras and two or three others. Being from
Pune, I wanted to go to College of Engineering,
Pune. They take, maybe one student out of a
thousand. And they take only 140 students in
civil, 140 in mechanical, and so on. I took the
tough examination to enter engineering, and I
was selected to go to Pune. I was fortunate that
it was my first choice, and I was admitted. Even
though my record was excellent, there were
many students who were better than I was. Just
unbelievably bright students, but fortunately I
got in.
At the engineering college we have to do three
more years. When I was growing up in India,
we spent 11 years in school (plus kindergarten),
then two years in college with general humanities and science courses, and then finally three
more years in engineering college to specialize
in one of the engineering disciplines. Our
choices were a Bachelor of Engineering in
Civil, Mechanical or Electrical.
In first year engineering, I entered civil engineering because my father wanted me to build
canals and bridges and so on. I had trouble,
because we had to do drawings. In those days
you had to learn how to draft plans. We had to
do a workshop and make different things. I was
good with theory, but not with my hands. I told
my father that I don’t like it. I’m really struggling. He said, “Good for you, struggle, but
finish it.” So, I hung on. The second year, more
theory came, and I started to excel. In the third
year, I was really a top student, because we
Haresh C. Shah • Early Life in India
studied mathematics, statistics, all the theory,
mechanics. I loved it, so I did well.
Choosing Stanford
for Graduate School
Shah: While I was in the third year, I applied
to University of Glasgow and Imperial College
in London. Those two were British schools. In
the U.S. I applied to MIT, Stanford and Princeton. Why did I select those three? My brother,
who was already in America, said “Haresh,
Chapter 1
these are the three well known schools that
are similar in cost.” In 1959, Stanford was a
good school, but not as well-known as it is
today. I got into all of them. Then the question
was, where do I go? My brother said, “Haresh,
Stanford has the best climate.” That clinched
it. The decision was not based on how good
Stanford was, or how great the professors were.
It was based on what is more comfortable for
an Indian; MIT and Princeton are cold.
7
Chapter 2
Graduate School
at Stanford
“The world is not deterministic. The world is
probabilistic. I realized that only two or three years
ago. I want you to also learn how the world is
probabilistic.”— Jack Benjamin
Anagnos: You had a good life in India, and then you decided to
come to the United States. How did you plan for it? How did you get
here?
A Long Ship Voyage
Shah: On August 4, 1959, my mother and father said goodbye
to me on a ship in Bombay. It was a P&O liner, and it was coming
from Australia. The ship was full of students — Australians,
Southeast Asians, and Indians going to British schools. There were
no regular cruise passengers. It was my first time out of India, so
of course, for my parents it was traumatic. There are my parents,
letting their 21-year-old son go far away to a place that they never
have been to. I really think they were bigger risk takers and bolder
than I was.
9
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
It was the middle of monsoon. The very first
day we left Bombay there was a violent storm,
the sea was really wild, and I remember the
waves rose above our ship. Everybody was sick,
sick as hell. I was not, I enjoyed it.
The first stop was Aden, in Yemen, just as you
enter the Red Sea. It was about 4 or 5 days from
Bombay to Aden by ship. When we landed in
Aden, we were all missing our Indian food.
We asked a merchant on the dock, is there an
Indian restaurant? He asked if we were Gujarati, and we replied yes. He said, “Come home,
my wife will cook for you. You are Gujarati. You
are from India.” His wife cooked a meal that I
still remember more than 60 years later.
We went through the Suez Canal, and they
let us take a side trip to the pyramids. Then
through Cairo, to Malta, and finally we
reached Marseille, France.
Tired of Ship Travel
Shah: In Marseille, we decided we were
tired of the ship after two weeks of travel. We
hatched a plan to get out of the ship and take a
train through France to the final destination,
Southampton, not realizing that you need a
visa, you need money, and you need permission
from the ship. We were naïve and so stupid. We
just took backpacks, left our bags on the ship,
and went by train to Paris. The five of us saw
lots of shows in Paris, and had a great time on
this adventure.
The ship was continuing from Marseille to
Gibraltar, around the curve to Southampton.
We took the ferry from Calais across the
Channel, to go to London by train. At Dover
we had to go through British immigration
10
and customs, and they were puzzled as to why
we were in Dover. We were supposed to be in
Southampton, and the ship had not yet arrived.
We said, “We have the British visa to enter.”
They said no, the visa was for entering in
Southampton. We asked them what should we
do. The immigration officer sternly said, “Since
you have the British visa, I’ll let you in, but
don’t do it again.” That’s all. He just said, don’t
do it again. So, we took the train to London.
I stayed with some relatives for a week in
London. Then the day the ship was supposed
to arrive, we went to Southampton to retrieve
our baggage. I told the immigration I needed
to board the ship to retrieve my bags. He asked
why we were not on the ship. He looked at my
passport and said, “This is a Dover stamp.
What have you done?” We told him we took
a train from Marseille to Dover to here. He
gave me a long lecture about how it was not
appropriate, but in the end he let me go on the
ship, pick up my bags.
Day 27: Hello United States
Shah: Next I took a cruise ship from
Southampton to New York. It was only four
and a half days. We were six floors below the
deck, because I had the cheapest tickets you
could buy. I had left Bombay 4th of August, and
I landed in New York the 31st of August.
My bus the next evening was not to Stanford,
but to Baton Rouge, where my brother was.
That’s when my real experience of America
began. The Greyhound bus goes first to
eastern Pennsylvania, and then turns south to
Roanoke, Virginia, and then on to Mississippi
and Alabama, and Louisiana.
Haresh C. Shah • Graduate School at Stanford
Surprised and Confused by
Segregation
Shah: When morning came we were on the
edge of the south. We stopped for an hour or so
to have breakfast, and take a bath if we wanted.
When I got out of the bus I saw signs, colored
and white. I asked the driver. “What is this sign
of colored and white?” He said, “Oh, these are
negroes. Colored is negroes, and white are the
white people.” I asked him, “I am from India.
What am I?” He said, “You are white.” I was
concerned that somebody might not like it
if I went to the white bathroom. He insisted,
“No, no, no, this is common. You can go to
the white. It’s okay.” But I was very timid, so I
didn’t go anywhere. I went back to my seat. It
lasted like this for the two and a half days to go
from New York to Baton Rouge. By the third
morning when it reached Baton Rouge, I was
absolutely miserable. I had not eaten, and not
taken anything to drink.
I didn’t know that America was like that. My
first three days of experience in the U.S., I’ll
never forget. That this so-called advanced
country, like America, was to me worse than
the caste system in India. In the caste system in
India, even the lowest caste, they all look like
me. So, just by looking at a person you don’t
separate them.
I spent a week with my brother, and then took
another Greyhound to Los Angeles. When my
brother and I were waiting for the bus to leave
the Baton Rouge Greyhound station, there
were quite a few Mexicans going to Texas.
Suddenly a whole group of policemen with
batons came in the station and started beating
those Mexicans. I asked, “Why are they beating
them? What happened?” My brother said that
Chapter 2
they suspect that they were not Americans and
they were in the U.S. illegally. I said, “How do
they know they are illegal? They just started
beating them.” He said, “That’s how it works.”
That was my second eye-opening experience:
the law was what the police thought was the
law.
Warm Welcome at Stanford
Shah: In Los Angeles I changed buses and
came to Stanford. When I got out of the bus,
right in front of me was the president of the
Foreign Students Association. He said, “Welcome Haresh to Stanford.” Wow, how nice!
He took me to the foreign students’ office on
campus, where my host, John Achelis, and his
family were waiting for me. They said, “We are
going to be your host family, to ease you into
life in America.”
I had two weeks to acclimatize, staying with
the family. They were wonderful people and
had two young children. They gave me a room,
and I learned what they eat at breakfast, lunch
and dinner. They would take me to campus
every day. Churches invited new students
from different countries to give a talk to their
congregations. During those two weeks, the
Achelis family took me to different churches
in the Bay Area to speak about Hinduism and
our education in India. They even drove us to
Santa Barbara to give a talk.
It was wonderful. Just 180 degrees different
than when I boarded the bus in the south. But
that’s when I realized that America is a big
country, and everyone is not the same.
11
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Anagnos: I imagine that going to the U.S. for
grad school was expensive. How did you pay
for it?
Shah: My father had fully paid for all the
education of all the children. By the time my
turn came he had exhausted a lot of money on
education. He said, I will send you and support
you, but your brother will also have to help. My
brother said, “Of course. You paid for all my
education.” He was working in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, as a highway engineer, so he would
provide me with tuition support. When I came
to Stanford I had no support, but after the first
quarter when I earned all As, they offered me
support. The tuition was paid by the university,
and room and board was paid by my brother. It
worked out quite well.
After the master’s degree I got an assistantship
with my adviser. I would grade all his papers
and help him with his research.
Anagnos: Was the transition to the U.S.
education system difficult?
Shah: In our schools, I must say, science,
mathematics, statistics and some of the courses
like algebra, geometry, calculus, were much
stronger than when I came here. Everything
that I did at MS level here I had already done
in my College of Engineering. So, to me the
Stanford courses were relatively easy. The only
courses where I didn’t get an A were French
and Russian. I just was not interested. I was
interested in mathematics and science.
Anagnos: Stanford is such a beautiful
campus. How did it compare to the campus in
Pune?
12
Shah: College of Engineering, Pune was on
the banks of a river, and the environment and
the facilities were very good. Pune College of
Engineering was well set, but nothing compared to Stanford. Stanford is 9,000 acres. Pune
College of Engineering was in a city confined
by the regular hum drum of the city life. It’s
like being within Philadelphia.
Anagnos: What were some of your first
impressions of Stanford?
Shah: When I met at the Greyhound Station
by the president of the Foreign Students
Association, I immediately felt like I had come
home. I looked around and thought what a
beautiful campus! Wow! What a nice place
this is. Especially looking at Palm Drive and
coming to a shaded, beautiful Mayfield Avenue,
and entering that old building in which the
Foreign Students Association was located.
I met some incredibly good people. A fellow
by the name of Warmbrun, who was the
foreign students’ adviser, shook my hand, and
said, “Welcome to Stanford.” I thought, “My
goodness, the director also is here.” There were
quite a few other students who had arrived a
few days before me. We all got together, said
hello to each other, and that was my initial
shockingly-good impression. Those initial
impressions stay with you.
Anagnos: After two weeks with your host
family, did you move into the residence halls
on campus?
Shah: I was assigned a room in Crothers
Memorial and my roommate was John Drake.
He was a little older than I was. I was 21 and
he was probably 30. He was employed by
Lockheed in Sunnyvale, but he was on leave for
Haresh C. Shah • Graduate School at Stanford
a year to do a master’s degree in aeronautics/
astronautics. We got along very well.
When I moved into Crothers Memorial, I did
not know any students in my class. Classes
had not begun yet, but Satish Shah, one of my
classmates from Pune, came to Stanford in the
same class. We two spent a few days walking
around the campus and being amazed by how
wonderful the campus was.
Food and the Social Scene
Anagnos: I am curious, did you have trouble
finding vegetarian food to eat?
Shah: I’m a vegetarian, I do not eat meat.
There were no Indian restaurants. There
were no Indian grocery stores. But you could
manage. At Crothers Hall, I was very popular
with the other students, because I would give
my meat to my friends. I ate the salads, bread
and cheese and other things. I took the meat
from the servers, then two or three guys would
come with me, and they would take my meat so
that they got more.
Anagnos: You were already showing your
entrepreneurial talent, with your food!
Shah: Crothers Memorial housed mainly
engineering graduate students, all men.
I became the Crothers Memorial social
secretary. I thought it would be fun. Being a
social secretary, I had to arrange dances many
weekends. St. Mary’s women’s college was
across the bay, and I would arrange for a bus
to bring their students over to have dinner and
dance. Those young women would come all
the way, and the Crothers Memorial residents
would just take the food and disappear. I
wanted the Stanford students to be hospitable
Chapter 2
and talk to our visitors from across the Bay,
even if they did not want to dance. After going
through this awkward situation couple of
times, I resigned as social secretary.
Some Courses Were a Review
Anagnos: Did you feel prepared for graduate
school?
Shah: I learned a lot that first year, but I had
already learned much of it in India. Everything
that they were teaching in ME 200, which is a
math class, or any class in statistics or calculus,
I knew. I said, “Why am I doing this again?” I
would ask questions, and the questions were
not for beginners who were learning it, but for
people who already knew calculus. My ME
200 professor, Bill Reynolds, said, “Haresh,
you disrupt the class.” I said, “What should I
do during class?” He said, “You come and sit.
But don’t ask any questions, and as a reward
I’ll assign you grading for all the homework.
You do the grading, and you’ll be paid for it.”
That’s how I started my teaching assistantship
in mathematics.
Same thing with Jack Benjamin, who became
my adviser. Jack used to say, “Haresh, why
are you taking my classes?” I told him that
his classes were required and hence I had to
take them. After two quarters, he asked me if I
wanted to go on for a PhD. He told me that he
would take care of my financial needs and gave
me a scholarship.
Stanford Professors
Anagnos: Tell us about your professors.
There were some real giants at Stanford.
13
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Shah: Jack Benjamin was the first professor I
met.5 He liked scheduling classes at 8 AM. Half
of us were asleep, and we didn’t like it. Some
of us asked him if he could change his class to
10 o’clock. He said, “Absolutely not. This is an
8 o’clock class, and you come. If you cannot
come, just tell me.” That was the end of that
argument. The reason we had to start so early
was because Don Young and Jack always played
golf on the Stanford golf course at 11 o’clock on
the days he had classes.6 So we couldn’t see him
between 11 until about 2 o’clock. We realized
that these professors are important people, and
you cannot fool around with their schedule
and their golf.
5 Jack R. Benjamin (1917–1998) was a professor in
the Department of Civil Engineering from 1948
to 1973. He earned his Doctor of Science degree
at MIT in 1942, was in the military during WWII
and then taught briefly at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute before going to Stanford. He authored
several important textbooks including Probability,
Statistics, and Decision Analysis for Civil Engineers
in 1970 with Allin Cornell. In 1973 he partnered
with Roland Sharpe, Gary Kost and Haresh Shah
to found Engineering Decision Analysis Company
(EDAC). Then in 1979, along with several others, he formed Jack R. Benjamin & Associates, a
consulting firm specializing in hazard analysis,
earthquake engineering, and application of probabilistic methods to engineering, safety and management problems.
6 Donovan H. Young (1904–1979) was a professor
in both the Department of Civil Engineering and
the Department of Applied Mechanics from 1937
to 1969. He was Acting Head of the Department
of Civil Engineering in 1952–53 and 1957–58. He
completed his doctoral research on steel columns
under the supervision of Stephen Timoshenko at
University of Michigan. He and Timoshenko later
wrote five widely used textbooks.
14
Jack Benjamin did not impress me on the first
day. He started telling us how to write like an
engineer, in beautiful script. The first week,
we spent just practicing A to Z of how to write
in a nice script. We were confused, “Why is he
telling us how to write?” But he would say that,
as engineers, anything we do on the plan must
be legible to everybody, and it must be very clear.
The first thing we need to understand is how
important it is that what we do has absolutely
no ambiguity, and is correctly understood by
everybody.
Then he started talking about approximate
methods for determining forces in members.
He would draw a frame, or he would draw a
structure and ask, “Just looking at it, tell me
how it would bend under vertical load. What is
the bending under a horizontal load? How will
it deform?” He perfected our understanding
of how structures behave, just visually, no
calculation, no nothing. Then he said, “Okay,
if you can visualize the bending, can you tell
me where the inflection point is? That is where
the slope changes from convex up to convex
down.” We thought, why does he want to know
that? He then explained that the inflection
point is where the moment is zero. He spent
so much time making us understand that the
structure is telling us, by its shape and by its
bending, where it is stressed, where there are
large moments, where it has a zero moment,
and where the slope changes. It was amazingly
effective. We could understand so many things
just by looking at the deflected shape. We spent
the first quarter only on that, understanding
structures and how they behave.
The next quarter he asked us to describe the
moments and stress distributions in a frame.
Haresh C. Shah • Graduate School at Stanford
We could do it just by drawing the deflected
shape, knowing how the deflected shape
controls the moments, and from the moments
determine the stresses. That was an eye opener!
We never learned anything like this in India.
In India, it was all analytical. You calculated
your moments and stresses, whereas here was
a professor, a well-known engineer, who taught
us that engineering is all about understanding
the structure, understanding how it behaves.
We started getting impressed with him. He
was a very low-key individual. He had very few
words to say, but oh he knew his structures.
Just about at that time he had published a book
on how to understand structures and their
behavior by their deflected shape.7 We read
that book and learned a lot.
I took courses from Wilhelm Flügge who
taught us theory of plates and shells.8 It was
extremely mathematical. He was an amazing
German mathematician. We learned so much
from him, especially mathematics, and I felt
very comfortable because mathematics was
7 Jack R. Benjamin, 1959, Statically Indeterminate
Structures: Approximate Analysis by Deflected Structures and Lateral Load Analysis, McGraw-Hill.
8 Wilhelm Flügge (1904–1990) was a professor in the
Department of Applied Mechanics. His early career
was in Germany, and in 1934 Flügge published his
most noted work Statik und Dynamik der Schalen,
which was translated into English in 1960. He and
his wife, Irmgard Flügge-Lotz, both came to Stanford in 1949 at the invitation of Stephen Timoshenko. Flügge-Lotz was a pioneer in the development
of the theory of discontinuous automatic control. In
1970, Wilhelm Flügge was awarded both the Theodore von Karman Medal in Engineering Mechanics, and the Worcester Reed Warner Medal from
the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Chapter 2
something I really enjoyed. Flügge’s classes
were entirely new. I had never before learned
anything that he taught.
We had classes from Harry Williams, who
taught soil mechanics.9 The topic was new to
me, but I didn’t like any of his classes, mainly
because I was not interested in soil mechanics.
I took some courses from Jim Gere, who was
an associate professor at the time.10 He was an
9 Harry A. Williams (1901–1982) earned an Engineer’s Degree from Stanford in 1933 after working for Standard Oil Company for five years. He
joined the Civil Engineering faculty in 1933 and
taught for 38 years. During the 1940s, he saw a
void in Stanford’s Civil Engineering curriculum in
the then-developing area of soil mechanics. To fill
this gap, he developed a soil mechanics laboratory
and created undergraduate and graduate courses,
which he taught until 1966. He studied the fatigue
properties of building materials, and effects of
dynamic loads on buildings with Professor Lydik
Jacobsen (who was the first president of EERI and
the engineer’s thesis advisor for John A. Blume).
With Professor Jack Benjamin, he performed a
series of now classical experiments on shear walls.
Other investigations included the behavior of
light-weight concrete, masonry, and plywood.
10 James M. Gere (1925–2008) was a professor in the
Department of Civil Engineering and co-founder
of the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering
Center at Stanford. After earning a master’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he was
awarded one of the first NSF Fellowships and
went to Stanford to earn his PhD. His PhD thesis,
Bending and Torsional Vibrations of Thin-walled
Bars of Open Cross Section (1954), was completed
under the supervision of Donovan H. Young.
Gere authored nine textbooks, many of which
were co-authored with Stanford colleagues including, Stephen Timoshenko, William Weaver,
Helmut Krawinkler, and Haresh Shah.
15
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
amazing professor. Bill Weaver, who was an
assistant professor, was the one who started
teaching us matrix methods.11 Matrix methods
were new, just coming online, and that was
his research. None of that was familiar from
India. In India, it was very traditional, moment
distribution and the general way of calculating
stresses and moments. We never discussed
that these things are related to deflected shape,
or why a shell structure is better in terms
of economy than a conventional structure.
Things like weight versus cost versus behavior
were something that we did not learn.
Borcherdt: I was curious, as to whether you
knew Professor Timoshenko.12
11 William Weaver. Jr. (1929–1994) was a professor
in the Department of Civil Engineering from
1969 to 1984. He was responsible for pioneering
research, including six textbooks, on the application of matrix methods and finite element
methods to the static and dynamic analysis of
complex structural systems.
12 Stephen P. Timshenko (1878–1972), was born
in Ukraine and performed some of his early research on the Rayleigh method, elastic bucking,
theory of elasticity and beam deflection at several universities there. He left Ukraine for political reasons, and took a professorship at Zagreb
Polytechnic Institute (1920–1922). In 1922 he
moved to the U.S. and worked at Westinghouse
Electric Corporation (1922–1927), University of
Michigan (1927–1936) and Stanford University
(1936–1944). He remained an emeritus professor
at Stanford until his death. He authored 13 influential textbooks, including Strength of Materials
and Engineering Mechanics. In 1957, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering established the Timoshenko Medal to recognize his
important contributions in the field of applied
mechanics.
16
Shah: Professor Timoshenko stopped
teaching before I came, but he was regularly
on campus. He collaborated quite a bit with
Don Young. I’ll tell you an incident. I was a
Teaching Assistant for Don and was meeting
with him to prepare the final exam and go over
the solutions. There was a knock on the door,
and before Don said anything, Timoshenko
burst in. Don looks at him and says “Don’t
you know I am meeting my teaching assistant
and working on solutions for the upcoming
examination?” My goodness, he was telling
Timoshenko that because Haresh was sitting
with him, he’s busy. So Timoshenko apologized
and he left. I was completely embarrassed
because these were the giants of mechanics
during those times.
Timoshenko used to give special lectures after
he was no longer teaching, at least one lecture
a quarter. His lectures were about his experiences over the years in Germany, his experiences working for General Electric or some of
his colleagues in this country, and he would
give lectures on that, or why he got involved in
mechanics. I attended every seminar or lecture
he gave, and his English was Russian-English,
wonderful accent. Really, you know, you were
just thrilled to sit in a room in which Timoshenko was lecturing, because we were using all
his works, whether theory of plates and shells,
structural dynamics, … so many books.
What impressed me the most about these great
professors — Timoshenko, Gere, Young — is
that they had one thing in common, they
treated everybody with great humility. It’s
amazing they had no arrogance. They were so
good in treating their students. To them, their
students were the ultimate important people.
Haresh C. Shah • Graduate School at Stanford
Fellow PhD Students
Anagnos: Some of your fellow students, like
Allin Cornell and Ted Zsutty, later became well
known academics in the field of earthquake
engineering.
Shah: When I came in ’59, Allin Cornell was
in his senior year.13 He was not yet a graduate
student, so we did not interact in the first
year at all. Ted Zsutty14 and Bill Venuti15 were
already PhD students, so initially we did not
interact with them very much. All these people,
with whom I later interacted intensely, were
not in my cohort.
Anagnos: You didn’t overlap very much at
Stanford with John Blume. When you were a
student, did you interact with him at all?
13 Carl Allin Cornell (1938–2007) earned his BA
in architecture (1960) and MS (1961) and PhD
(1964) in civil engineering from Stanford. He
became a professor at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (1964–1983), and then returned
to Stanford in 1983 as a research professor. His
research was foundational in the development of
the field of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis.
14 Theodore C. Zsutty (1929–2022) earned his PhD
in 1961 and became a professor at San José State
University (1961–2005). He was heavily involved
in the development of codes and served as editor
for several editions of the SEAOC Blue Book and
the initial Seismic Design Manuals.
15 William Venuti (1924–2024) earned his PhD
in 1963 and taught at San José State University
(1955–1997). His research and consulting activities focused on prestressed concrete. In 1971, Bill
taught Jack Benjamin’s classes when Jack took a
personal leave.
Chapter 2
Shah: John Blume knew both Don Young
and Jack Benjamin quite well. John would
come to Stanford often to see Don. When
he came, we students would meet John on
campus, and a few times Don arranged for
us to go to Blume’s office to see what a San
Francisco structural engineering office looks
like. John very graciously showed us around
and talked about various projects. He had quite
a few projects on nuclear shelters, and also
nuclear power plants. We all looked up to him
as a big time engineer owning an office in San
Francisco.
We got to know him enough that he confided
in us that he really would like to do a PhD. But
he felt uneasy at his age that his opportunity is
gone. Don Young used to say, “There is never
a lost opportunity. If you want to do it, come
back and I’ll be your advisor. I’ll give you a
problem that even you will find interesting.” So
that’s how John came back to Stanford in ’64.
I was already at Penn. He finished his degree
before I came back in ’68.
The World Is Not Deterministic
Anagnos: When I came to Stanford, we
all took probability and statistics for civil
engineering (CE 203). Did you have any class
like that at that time?
Shah: No, there was no class like that in civil
engineering at that time. That happened later.
Anagnos: How did you get so involved with
probabilistic methods?
Shah: I was really attracted to the work
Jack Benjamin was doing, so I talked to Jack.
“What should I do after my Masters? Should
I take a job somewhere and then go back to
17
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
India, or should I go on for a PhD?” He said,
Haresh you are doing quite well. But you need
to learn a few new things. I’m also learning, so
you will learn with me. He said, “The world is
not deterministic. The world is probabilistic. I
realized that only two or three years ago. I want
you to also learn how the world is probabilistic.
If you take ten cylinders of concrete and break
them, why don’t they all fail at the same time,
even though they were made together? Because
there are so many uncertainties and variables
and hence each one is different. Just like every
person is different, even twins are different.”
He said, you need to learn statistics. So I took
the first course, STAT 110 taught by Gerald
Lieberman.16 Just statistics, how to deal with
data. And I aced it, I really liked it.
Shah: Next, Jack suggested that I take STAT
116, which is probability. Almost every student
in the classroom was a statistics major. They
had already taken many other statistics classes
and we engineers were thrown into that class.
It was tough, and we struggled, but made
it through. Every time we took these types
of courses, Jack and some of his students,
16 Gerald Lieberman (1925–1999) was hired in 1953
in both the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Department of Statistics at Stanford. He later played a key role in founding the
Department of Operations Research in 1967, held
numerous administrative positions, including
Provost, and retired in 1994. He made significant scholarly contributions to statistics and
operations research in the areas of sampling inspection, quality control, regression, system reliability, replacement policies, inventory control,
and stochastic assignment problems. He wrote
several widely-used textbooks on statistics in engineering and operations research.
18
Ted Zsutty included, would discuss what we
learned. As Jack told us, he himself had a lot
to learn. So through him and through our
discussions we realized that there is a lot to be
understood in engineering about why things
sometimes happen unexpectedly.
Anagnos: What was Jack Benjamin like as an
advisor?
Shah: Jack was a guy of very few words. He
did not speak if he didn’t want to or if he didn’t
have to. But as time went by, we got to know
each other quite well. As a matter of fact, my
thesis was typed by his daughter, completely
free. I would invite him to my apartment for
dinner, and we would sit down and talk. Usually the talk was about his work, his golf, and
his background. He was a superb adviser in
the sense that in just a few words he would say
“You dummy, that’s not the way to do it.” But,
he never underestimated you or overestimated
you. He had a knack for understanding what
you could or could not do.
Jack was kind of an enigma, in the sense that I
couldn’t figure out until the very last few days of
his life that he was a real philosopher. Students
either loved him or hated him because of his
style. When I would tell classmates what a
fantastic guy he was, some students would look at
me like I was crazy. But he really was wonderful.
Without him I wouldn’t have been given all the
opportunities that I got. He would go out of his
way to make sure that his students were placed in
the right place. He did that for all his students.
Anagnos: Would you say that Jack Benjamin
was ahead of the state of the practice? In other
words, this focus on statistics and variability
wasn’t being done elsewhere in the U.S.
Haresh C. Shah • Graduate School at Stanford
Shah: He was the pioneer. Everybody used
to say, what is he talking about? Why is he
interested in statistics? He would insist that if
you don’t understand statistics, you will not
understand engineering, and especially civil
engineering, where materials are not homogeneous, materials are not all exactly the same,
whether it’s wood, concrete, or even steel. He
said, if you cannot master why there is variation and what’s the range of values in terms
of strength and deformation and so on, you’ll
never be able to understand good engineering.
So we all learned together.
Research on Probabilistic
Methods
Shah: Ted Zsutty was researching probabilistic methods for determining strength of
concrete beams.17 Jack asked me to do similar
work, but for columns, because in columns
there is the additional problem of buckling. I
had to compile data from all over the country
wherever columns and frames were tested,
and then use that data and regression analysis
to understand the variation. When identical
columns, in identical situations, are tested
under identical loads, why do they behave
differently, that was my research.18 Looking
back it seems so trivial, but at that time we did
not understand how much variation there was.
Chapter 2
We wanted to understand this variation so it
could be included in the code to provide proper
safety.
Anagnos: And how did you get all the data
from these experiments around the United
States? How did you even know that these
experiments were going on?
Shah: It was very easy—Jack Benjamin.
Everybody knew Jack. He was getting data
from everywhere, through his contacts. He
would just give us the data and say, this is
from Illinois, this is from Berkeley, this is
from wherever there was testing. You know,
he earned his PhD at MIT, then he taught at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and then he
came to Stanford. He knew faculty from these
schools, and he would get data from them.
Ted and I got heavily involved, because we
were doing similar work, though on different
parts of the structure: he on beams and me on
columns.
17 Zsutty, T. C., 1961, A Statistical Analysis of the
Ultimate Strength of Reinforced Concrete Beams
Without Web Reinforcement, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Stanford University.
I learned a lot from Ted. He was very frustrated
many times trying to figure out why there
was so much variation. It turned out that the
samples and data were from two different
universities using different equipment and
testing methods, and hence, it was difficult
to compare their results. In 1961, Ted finished
his PhD and Bill Venuti started to collaborate
more with Jack. Bill had taken a leave of
absence from San José State to come full time
to Stanford to finish his PhD, which he had
been doing in bits and pieces while he was
working.19 Ted, Bill, Allin Cornell and I used
18 Shah, H.C., 1962, Application of Regression Analysis for Predicting Ultimate Strength of Reinforced
Concrete Columns, Dept. of Civil Engineering,
Stanford University.
19 Venuti, W. J., 1963, Probability of Fatigue Failure
of Bonded-type Prestressed Concrete Beams, Dept.
of Civil Engineering, Stanford University.
19
Chapter 2
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
to meet at Bill’s house quite often to talk about
our work. It was amazingly friendly, a good
learning environment. Everyone was trying to
help each other. Everyone was trying to learn
also from Jack. Jack, as I said, spoke very little.
He would say two words, and then we had
to decipher; what did he say, what does that
mean? But it was good, because together we
developed a system for deciphering what Jack
was trying to tell us.
Anagnos: What was Allin’s particular
take on this whole thing? What was his PhD
research?
Shah: During my second year at Stanford,
Allin joined the master’s program. He was a
wizard. I was a TA for Jack, and I remember
Allin in those classes, and he was very good,
right from the beginning, from day one.
For his PhD, Allin worked on stochastic
processes.20 It was more related to dynamics.
20 Cornell, C. A., 1964, Stochastic Process Models in
Structural Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Stanford University.
20
His background at Stanford, in mathematics
and statistics, was very strong. So he came with
a very strong interest, as well as knowledge, in
statistics. He was a natural at deciphering how
to deal with a problem.
We all trudged along, and in September 1962
Bill Venuti and I submitted our theses. They
did not award your PhD degree at the endof-summer. Instead they told us our degrees
would be at the end of fall quarter, and if we
wanted to walk through the ceremony, come
back in June. So our degrees were awarded
in January ’63, and Bill and I walked through
graduation in June ’63.
Chapter 3
Choosing an
Academic Career
Even though living in Philadelphia is not like living at
Stanford, “Go there” was the very best decision and
advice Jack Benjamin gave.
Anagnos: What were your options after you finished your PhD?
Shah: NASA in Mountain View had lots of jobs for PhDs at that
time. That was one opportunity. Second, was the academic world,
but jobs in the academic world were few and far between. I talked to
Jack and he said “Why don’t you work with me here? I will give you
a postdoc, and during the time you are doing the postdoc, we can
find a job for you. I have a project on nuclear shelters. You will have
to understand everything about nuclear explosions, the blast loads,
the protective systems of concrete and other materials, and how
much protection the earth itself gives, so that we can build these
types of shelters with the right materials, and determine how deep
underground they should be.” I ended up working on that project
in the summer of ’63, after I had been teaching at Penn for a year.
21
Chapter 3
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
First Job at
University of Pennsylvania
About February ’62, before I had even submitted my thesis, Jack talked to the head of the
Civil Engineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His name was Sidney
Shore.21 Sidney knew Jack quite well; they
both were structural engineers. Jack must have
said that I was a good student, and I would
be a good assistant professor, because Sidney
asked me to meet him at a conference he was
attending in Berkeley. We talked for about ten
minutes while he was busy with his conference.
He didn’t say anything about a job, and he
left. A couple of weeks later I got a letter of
appointment. I said, “What? I have not applied
yet.” He said, “Jack did. Jack told me that you
are good, so I am the committee of one, and I
decided. Come to Penn on August 1.” Although
I wouldn’t have finished my PhD, he said he
would give me an instructor position until the
degree was granted. So, I became an instructor
in civil engineering starting August 1, 1962. The
position was changed to Assistant Professor in
January ’63, as soon as I earned my PhD.
Anagnos: Before we talk in detail about your
life at Penn, I want to ask about your wife Joan.
Were you already married when you moved to
Pennsylvania?
Shah: When I was finishing my PhD in ’62,
I was one of the few students who had a car.
21 Sidney Shore (1921–1981) began his career as an
Assistant Professor at Princeton University from
1946 to 1952. He then spent 30 years at the University of Pennsylvania as a civil engineering
faculty. He was a pioneer in the use of electronic
computers for civil engineering analysis.
22
Since many didn’t have a driver’s license, they
would ask if I could be a driver to take them
wherever they wanted to go. I had a friend who
had a girlfriend who worked in the German
Consulate in San Francisco. On weekends, he
would go on a date with her. I was the official
chauffeur, acting like a chauffeur, never telling
her that I am his friend. I did this for a few
weeks and then told him it was getting to be
too much. Next time he wanted a ride, he
would need to find me a date. He told me, that’s
not a problem, his girlfriend has a roommate
from Holland who she can bring. So that’s how
I met Joan in February ’62, being a chauffeur.
She was completing an undergraduate degree
in psychology at San Francisco State at the
time. When I went to Penn, I left as friends
with Joan, but we kept in touch. She came to
Pennsylvania and we got married in December
1965, and our older son Hemant was born in
1966.
Anagnos: That was pretty brave of her
to pick up and move across the country to
Pennsylvania. Getting back to being a professor at Penn, did you introduce probabilistic
methods to the curriculum, or did they already
have it?
Shah: I gave a graduate seminar on probabilistic methods, but there was no course. At
Penn, all graduate courses were in the evening
to take care of the students who worked during
the day. I used to teach three courses at Penn,
one seminar and two other courses. The
seminar was on probabilistic methods. That
seminar turned into a course when I came to
Stanford. Jack already had started teaching
probabilistic methods, but as an ad hoc
seminar, not a formal course.
Haresh C. Shah • Choosing an Academic Career
Anagnos: You’re saying that when you came
to Stanford, that’s when the CE 203 class got
started. Great class! It was fun and covered all
new content for me as master’s student.
Shah: Yes, that’s when it really got started.
Exploring Career
Options in India
Anagnos: Why did you decide on an academic career? Did you think about any other
kinds of careers, or did it just sort of fall in your
lap?
Shah: When I finished my PhD, I had
tremendous pressure to go back to India from
my family, especially my mother. Even though I
had an offer from Penn, I applied to the Indian
Space program as soon as I finished my thesis.
I also applied to the Indian Space and Research
Organization, and a center for research on
armament in India. I got interviews with both.
One was in Pune, where I came from, and the
other one was in southern India, where the
space station was.
I went to southern India for the interview
and they had me stay in a guest house. In the
morning I saw a huge snake in the bathroom.
I thought, this is not a place for me. I told
them, “Thank you for inviting me, but I’m
not interested. You have a snake in the guest
room where I was sleeping, so I don’t want
your job.” I left without any interview. What is
funny is that without an interview, and my bad
behavior, I still got an appointment letter. Of
course, I didn’t go.
Anagnos: Well, I would be put off by a snake
in my bathroom too.
Chapter 3
Shah: The other job, which was in Pune, was
doing research on armaments. My family knew
the director of that center, so I was assured that
I’ll get a job. I had a good chat with him, but I
wasn’t interested. This is not what I wanted to
do.
I wanted to be with students so I could learn
continuously all my life. You know, after a few
years it’s not only you who teaches the students,
the students also keep you current. I knew
that through my own experience with Jack
Benjamin that we taught him a lot related to
some analytical things. The academic world
was something very attractive to me.
Anagnos: Between 1959, when you left India
and 1963, when you came back for interviews
(fortunately flying this time), had you gone
back to India at all?
Shah: No.
Anagnos: This is the first time you saw your
family. Wow!
Shah: They were very happy that I was there
to look for a job. But they were very disappointed that I did not accept either job.
Research on
Helicopter Rotor Fatigue
Anagnos: Tell us about your first faculty
position at Penn.
Shah: The University of Pennsylvania
was the best thing that happened to me as a
young new faculty member. For the first time,
I realized that you have to think about your
research on your own. There is nobody to hand
you a research project. You have to support
your students financially. The ecosystem of
23
Chapter 3
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
writing proposals, getting research funds, and
supporting students was unknown to me until
I had to do it.
Philadelphia was an excellent location, because
Boeing Vertol Aircraft Company had their
headquarters for all their Chinook and other
helicopters in Philadelphia. The first thing
I did was write a proposal on probabilistic
methods of determining fatigue failure of
rotor blades. Fortunately, I was funded, which
meant that in the very first year I could support
PhD students. I was there for six years, ’62 to
’68, and produced four PhD students. There
are a couple of reasons I could do this. One,
availability of funding and understanding how
the system worked. Two, a couple of summers
I could get a consulting job working at the
helicopter facility. I realized how good some
of the designers and the engineers were, and
how real problems in the field were challenging
them, like rotor blades failing due to fatigue.
They just couldn’t figure out why they had such
a large safety factor and still those blades were
failing. Finally, my position at Penn gave me an
opportunity to publish in my own name with
my students as co-authors.
Later Jack hinted to me that one of the determining factors in my Stanford faculty application was that all my publications were in my
name and my students’ names. This showed
that I had started my career independently,
rather than relying on my former professors
to help me. It made me independent. It made
me struggle, and it made me a faculty member.
When I came to Stanford I was ready. I was
ready to write proposals to NSF or anybody
within my universe of opportunities. Penn
worked out well.
24
Anagnos: That’s an interesting story,
because your background was in civil engineering, and then you’re researching fatigue on
rotor blades for helicopters. I guess mechanics
is mechanics, but nonetheless it was a very
different application of all the theory that you
had learned.
Shah: Essentially it was mechanics, as you
say, but a very different type. As a matter of
fact, during that rotor blade problem, I had
to learn something about entropy and theory
of maximum entropy. I learned all kinds of
things. Even though living in Philadelphia is
not like living at Stanford, “Go there” was the
very best decision and advice Jack Benjamin
gave.
Job Opportunity at Stanford
Anagnos: How did you end up going back to
Stanford?
Shah: Jack still wanted me to work on this
project with nuclear fallout shelters. So in
summer ’63, when I came to walk through
the graduation ceremony, I worked with
Jack on the nuclear explosions and shelters
for the public. Shelters were a craze in those
days, because the political environment and
the nuclear environment around the world
was very dangerous, and all Americans were
afraid of some accident where people would be
subjected to nuclear fallout.
During that summer Jack asked if I would like
to stay at Stanford. I said, yes, I would like to
come back from Penn. He told me, we can get
you a job as an assistant professor, but if I were
you I wouldn’t do this. For your own good,
stay where you are. Publish some papers, make
Haresh C. Shah • Choosing an Academic Career
a name as a young faculty member, and then
when Don Young retires, you will be a good
candidate. So, I stayed at Penn.
Don planned to retire in ’67. By that time Jim
Gere had become the department chair, so he
announced the position. All of Jack’s students
applied because the position was about probabilistic methods in civil engineering. Over a
period of three months we all came to give
the usual candidate’s lecture to the students.
I was told that something like 80 candidates
had applied and all of Jack’s students were the
finalists.
Anagnos: At that time, which universities
had students completing PhD theses in
probabilistic methods?
Shah: MIT did. Berkeley was just getting
started, but they didn’t yet have any PhD
graduates in probabilistic methods. I think a
couple of universities in Canada. The University of Waterloo had a few people working on
probabilistic methods. Davenport, in Canada,
was doing work in probabilistic methods for
wind loads. But somehow Jack’s students ended
up as finalists.
Chapter 3
with, like Jack Benjamin, Jim Gere and Bill
Weaver, had been your professors. What was
it like to come back and suddenly be their
colleague?
Shah: It was fun. For a long time, I still
would call them Professor Benjamin, Professor
Weaver, Professor Gere. And they kept insisting, call me Bill, or call me Jim. I would say,
“Okay, Jim, oh I mean, okay, Professor Gere.”
He would say, “There you go again.” It took
me a while to become a colleague, rather than
being a student. Especially coming from India,
you’d never call anybody by their first name.
You would always call someone by their official
name, professor, or doctor, or whatever. That’s
what is nice about this country. Very quickly
you become friends, rather than hierarchical.
Unlike in the UK where there is one professor
and everybody else is the worker. Here there
can be ten professors and everybody works
collaboratively. There are some incredibly good
cultural issues in America that do not exist
anywhere else. And that’s what makes it great
here.
In December ’67, Jim called and said, “Haresh,
congratulations. You have a job with us.”
That’s how I began my career at Stanford in
September 1968, as associate professor of civil
engineering. The department was just called
Civil Engineering. At that time, specializations
of environmental, construction, hydrology,
soil mechanics, etc., were under civil engineering, and here was even an architecture
specialization.
Anagnos: When you came back in ’68, some
of these people whom you were now working
25
Chapter 4
Earthquake
Engineering at
Stanford
Application of their tools to the development of
seismic hazard maps . . . and quantifying vulnerability
was an area with enormous potential for research
and discovery.
Anagnos: You weren’t going to work on helicopters anymore.
How did you establish your research focus when you came back to
Stanford?
Shah: When I decided to explore earthquake engineering as a
research field, I studied earthquake disasters around the world. I
did this not for any research, but just for my knowledge of what’s
going on, especially in developing countries of Central America,
Asia, China, India. Some truly great earthquakes occurred in
these areas. I learned that there is no equity in the world in terms
of how people suffer, die, lose their houses, lose their livelihoods.
While indeed it is part of the solution, I didn’t believe that the
highest priority was to fine tune our U.S. codes and building
practices. Mind you, this is about 1970, more than 50 years ago.
In my own mind, we needed to take simple steps in countries that
27
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
have the greatest losses and casualties to make
significant change with respect to earthquakes
and the disasters.
When I looked at the history of earthquake
engineering, I realized that with all that great
work done by George Housner and others,
and the great geology work that was going on
at Stanford and other places, there was really
no change in the number of deaths. If you look
at the history, there was not even a blip in the
effect that research had made on the number
of people dying globally. In my own mind, we
needed to start looking at the broader cause
of the problem, and not the fine tuning of the
engineering. That problem was awareness,
resiliency, and making the governments aware
that you can minimize, not eliminate losses.
Even if you decrease losses by five percent,
it would be a huge change. I wanted to go to
countries that were completely off the map of
earthquake engineering. They had no idea that
they could improve their resiliency, by which
they could decrease their risk and decrease the
impact of the resulting disaster.
Anagnos: Now you had an area of focus,
what were your next steps?
Shah: My first task was to see what the other
universities were doing in earthquake research
and what aspects of that research needed to
be augmented. Most of the research in those
days was focused on structural-component
testing and structural models for purposes of
understanding their behavior under dynamic
loads. Researchers were doing plenty of work
related to collapsed or damaged structures, but
not much on understanding why earthquakes
create so many losses and casualties. I wanted
to focus on the impact of earthquakes.
28
I wanted to understand the global picture of
earthquake impacts. Our observations showed
that poorer countries were experiencing more
significant impacts than richer countries for
the same size earthquake. That is, a magnitude
6 earthquake would be a major disaster in
Nepal, but here it would be just a big headline
with severe damage and a lot of inconvenience,
but not a major disaster.
Another motivating factor was the influence
of Jack Benjamin and his students on our
thinking about how to use some of the available statistical tools to explore earthquake
damage and loss. Application of their tools
to the development of seismic hazard maps,
collection of exposure data, and understanding
and quantifying vulnerability was an area with
enormous potential for research and discovery.
Anagnos: What other work was available for
you to build on?
Shah: Earlier work, especially by Giuseppe
Grandori and others, used empirical methods
to develop vulnerability curves, expressed as
intensity versus damage.22 However, it was
clear we needed to strengthen our understanding of the vulnerability of structures and to
incorporate statistical methods in order to
estimate uncertainty. We needed to determine
how to use uncertainty measures and bounds
22 Giuseppe Grandori (1921–2011), Professor at
Politecnico di Milano, worked in probabilistic
seismic hazard, seismic risk, structural dynamics and seismic design. He served as president of
both the European Association for Earthquake
Engineering and the International Association
for Earthquake Engineering.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
Chapter 4
to provide better estimates of damage from the
next Los Angeles or San Francisco earthquake.
to understand why certain areas are more
hazardous than the others.”
Bob Whitman and Allin Cornell at MIT were
looking at seismic risk of multi-story buildings
and nuclear power plants. We undertook
development of a similar methodology for
cities and civilian society. Stanford’s strength
was in structural dynamics, matrix methods,
and structural analysis. At the time, we didn’t
have the breadth of faculty to create a robust
earthquake engineering center that could
evaluate all aspects of seismic risk, but that is
what we wanted to do.
Believe it or not, the Central Bank of Nicaragua
gave me a few hundred thousand dollars and
said, “Okay, let’s draw the map.” I got in touch
with our geology/seismology department, and
had some students like Anne Kiremidjian,
Chris Mortgat and a few others help me.24, 25
First Seismic Hazard Maps
Anagnos: What were some of your first
projects?
Shah: The first thing I focused on was
nearby countries that I could work with.
Emilio Rosenblueth was a well-known earthquake engineer in Mexico.23 He introduced me
to people in Guatemala and Nicaragua. When
the Managua earthquake occurred in 1972, I
went to Nicaragua to talk to the government.
They didn’t know me from Adam. I just went
there and said, “Can we work together to do
something about increasing the awareness and
resiliency of your country? The first thing to do
is to draw seismic hazard maps of your country
23 Emilio Rosenblueth (1926–1994), consulting
structural engineer and professor at Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Some
of his contributions are discussed in Vitelmo V.
Bertero Connections, The EERI Oral History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute,
Oakland, CA, 2009, pp 85–86.
Nicaragua led me to Guatemala.26 Guatemala
led me to Costa Rica 27, which led me to
Honduras.28 I was working throughout Central
America, and at one time I had a problem with
not enough students. Because each country
needed two or three students, and there were
not enough students to do the work. Some of
24 H.C. Shah, C.P. Mortgat, A. Kiremidjian, and
T.C. Zsutty, 1975, A Study of Seismic Risk for Nicaragua, Part 1, John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center Technical Report 11, Stanford
University.
25 H.C. Shah, T.C. Zsutty, H. Krawinkler, C.P.
Mortgat, A. Kiremidjian, and J.O. Dizon, 1976, A
Study of Seismic Risk for Nicaragua, Part 2, John
A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center Technical Report 12, Stanford University.
26 A.S. Kiremidjian, H.C. Shah, and L. Lubetkin,
1977, Seismic Hazard Mapping for Guatemala,
John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center
Technical Report 26, Stanford University.
27 C.P. Mortgat, T.C. Zsutty, H.C. Shah and L. Lubetkin, 1977, A Study of Seismic Risk for Costa
Rica, John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering
Center Technical Report 25, Stanford University.
28 A.S. Kiremidjian, P. Sutch and H.C. Shah, 1979,
Seismic Hazard Analysis of Honduras, John A.
Blume Earthquake Engineering Center Technical Report 38, Stanford University.
29
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
it was field work. You had to go to the country,
understand the local geology, what the seismologists were saying there, and what the state
of knowledge was.
Anagnos: These projects you just mentioned
spanned many countries. What kind of lessons
did you learn?
Shah: Thinking about risk analysis on a
global scale, one thing became very clear to me.
I learned from my trips to Nicaragua, China,
Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala,
Algeria, Myanmar, and Vietnam that every
country had different problems. In all cases,
something beyond engineering came into
play. Sometimes it was corruption, sometimes
politics or economics, sometimes lack of
education, and sometimes lack of motivation.
Sometimes it was combination of all of these.
For example, China and India are two huge
countries with a very large supply of very
talented people, who could do anything we can
do in this country, and maybe even better and
cheaper. But still in the 1960s and ’70s during
the Cultural Revolution and the early years of
India’s independence, they were struggling and
unable to implement effective risk reduction
policies. As a result, we tried to account for
the socioeconomic factors in our efforts to
encourage implementation of earthquake risk
reduction policies in developing countries.
I will tell you about a big political mistake. In
Guatemala, I knew the owner of the biggest
engineering company. He, together with our
Stanford team and some funding agencies
in Guatemala, developed a Guatemalan
seismic hazard map (not a risk map). When
we drew the map, Guatemala City came in
the Red Zone. It was one of the worst areas in
30
Guatemala, and the government didn’t like
that. The government called me and said we
would like you to remove the city from the Red
Zone. I said, “Look, you asked me to draw a
seismic hazard map with whatever little information we have. It looks like Guatemala City is
in a Red Zone.” They said, “You are not going
to remove it?” I said, “No, you can remove it if
you want, but my final report will say that it is
what it is.” The next morning, the newspaper
said that the government determined that I am
incompetent and that I should be declared as
persona non grata. The headline was something like, Stanford Professor declared persona
non grata, and he must leave the country. I got
a letter at the same time that we must leave the
country. So I was thrown out of the country.
Borcherdt: Was there another map that had
been made?
Shah: They were working with USGS on one.
Anagnos: But you did publish the seismic
hazard map as Blume Center Report No. 26.
There are two versions. There’s the USGS
version, and then there’s your version as a
report. Right?
Shah: Correct. I don’t know what the USGS
did later on, officially, but one of the consultants advising Guatemala was from USGS, and
he was the one who was responsible for saying
that I’m incompetent. Anyway, they called me
back after a few months and asked if I could
now continue the risk work, and get the data on
the population and housing and the economy.
I said “Sure, I have no problem with working.
If you think this is something that needs to be
done, let’s do it.” So we did the second part of
the project.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
Same thing in Algeria. In Algeria we did all
the work, developed the map, and analyzed
the risk, with Ted Zsutty. Ted wrote a model
code for Algeria, and we published it. We
recommended that it should be mandatory,
and the government didn’t want it mandatory.
We argued that if it’s not mandatory, it won’t
work, nobody will use it. They didn’t like it,
and eventually they made its use voluntary.
What can you do? Politics is more powerful
than science
Anagnos: When you did that first work in
Nicaragua, had you ever drawn a seismic risk
map before? How did you know where to start
and what to do?
Shah: It was Allin Cornell’s idea. Allin
and his colleagues at MIT were working on
seismic risk for individual buildings.29 And
they gave me an idea. I said, “If they can do it
for individual structures, why can’t I do it for
a whole region?” But I had never created a risk
map before. The students and I learned from
each other, made mistakes, so many times we
made mistakes.
John Blume sent one of his top employees, Jagat
Dalal, to do his PhD under me.30 We initiated
a plan to develop methodologies for assessing
the impact of large earthquakes on cities
and urban areas. We developed site-specific
29 R.V. Whitman, J.M. Biggs, J.E. Brennan III, C.A.
Cornell, R.L. de Neufville, and E.H. Vanmarcke,
1975, Seismic Design Decision Analysis, ASCE
Journal of the Structural Division, 101(5), 1067–
1084.
30 J.S. Dalal, 1975, Probabilistic Seismic Exposure
and Structural Risk Evaluation. John A. Blume
Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 15.
Chapter 4
analysis procedures for probabilistic estimates
for damage and loss along the lines of what
Allin Cornell described in his 1968 Engineering
Seismic Risk Analysis paper.31 At that time,
we did not realize that extrapolation of these
procedures to risk assessments for urban areas
would lead to procedures useful for the insurance industry.
I also came to know Franz Sauter, a famous
engineer who was running a large office in San
Jose, Costa Rica.32 He came to Stanford, heard
about our ideas and suggested that we collaborate. He showed me some of the work he was
doing and provided advice about what could
be done in a country that did not have a very
sophisticated understanding of the behavior
of structures. He was pivotal in helping us
understand that each country has a different
level of understanding and that seismic hazard
and risk assessments for each country must
account for that level of understanding in order
to be effective.
31 C. Allin Cornell, 1968, Engineering Seismic Risk
Analysis. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of
America, 58 (5): 1583–1606.
32 Franz Fabian Sauter (1933–2003), professor at
University of Costa Rica and founder of Franz
Sauter y Asociados, a pioneering company in
earthquake-resistant structural engineering in
Costa Rica. He performed research in the areas
of earthquake insurance and damage assessment, earthquake hazard and vulnerability, and
earthquake-resistant design for construction
projects.
31
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
John A. Blume Earthquake
Engineering Center Founded
Anagnos: Did these efforts contribute to the
founding of the Blume Center?
Shah: At the same time that we started our
research program we were also very diligently
looking at funding. The department and the
provost gave us initial startup money with the
proviso that we would have to raise additional
operation and development funds. I was
selected to do the fundraising and started talking with John Blume. We also talked to a few
other companies in San Francisco to see if they
would partially support or become members
of the future center. Fortunately, John said he
was thinking about it, and he wanted to do
something for Stanford. He always said that he
wanted to leave his legacy at Stanford in any
way he could.33 This discussion went on for a
year or so, and finally in 1973 we all agreed that
John would provide enough funding to set up
the lab and establish the center. I would then
have to get external funding from various other
agencies to do the research.
In 1974 we set up the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center. The building that
became the Blume Center was used previously
by the mechanical engineering department,
and it housed a wind tunnel.34 We convinced
33 John Blume discusses his role in the founding of
the Blume Center in John A. Blume, Connections,
The EERI Oral History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Oakland, CA, 1994,
pp 90–91.
34 Before it housed the wind tunnel, this same
building housed the 9-ft by 12-ft shake table designed by Lydik Jacobsen that was used for the
32
the Provost, the President, and the ME department that the building should be converted
into an earthquake engineering lab and center.
The Blume Center opening was on September
17, 1976. Provost Bill Miller and John Blume
were there. As the founding Co-Directors, Jim
Gere and I, were very pleased with the opening
ceremonies. In all this, Jim was the most stable
person. I was running here and running there,
but he was the person who always made sure
that the paperwork was done, and signed and
agreed upon. He was the person who made
it possible. Jim was a perfect partner. I was
the person who had many ideas, and who ran
around asking people to provide funding. But
that doesn’t create a center. Without Jim, the
center would not have been possible.
Anagnos: Did the founding of the Blume
Center affect who you hired as faculty later?
Shah: Absolutely. As years went by, we
hired people to fill in the gaps that we had in
this bigger vision of the Blume Center. Our
vision was that this center should impact
mitigation of earthquake risk globally, not
only for the United States. We wanted to be
known worldwide. We wanted to partner with
everybody everywhere, including extremely
underdeveloped or developing countries. We
wanted to make sure that we could understand
their needs and what we could do to work with
them. Today, I think the Blume Center is probably as well known around the world as in this
country. In the U.S. we are part of the various
consortia, so people know about us, and our
testing of the 15-story Alexander Building described in the engineer’s thesis of John A. Blume
and Harry L. Hesselmeyer.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
Chapter 4
former students are all over the country now.
They have contributed tremendously.
into the socioeconomic aspects of earthquake
engineering.
We were very careful in making sure that we
kept a bigger picture of why losses occur. It was
very clear at that time that losses occur not only
as a result of engineering, but there are social,
economic, and political aspects, and we wanted
to understand all of this together.
Seismic Hazard Methodology
Public Policy Research
Anagnos: Did that lead to your work in
public policy research?
Shah: Yes, that’s how public policy research
came in. For example, as a country or as a
research organization, should we invest in
prediction or in engineering? Of course, it is
not this or that, but where should the focus
be? Is prediction going to help in reducing
the losses, or is better engineering and better
understanding going to help reduce the losses?
That was our question.
Anagnos: Who funded that public policy
research?
Shah: We had a center at Stanford, it was
called Ethics in Society. I used to talk to their
faculty about what we should do. I also started
talking to Elisabeth Pate in the Department
of Engineering-Economic Systems, and then
asked her professor if she could work jointly
with him and me.35 The Blume Center partially
funded her work. At that same time, there
were several students who started looking
35 M.-E. Pate, 1978, Public Policy in Earthquake Effects Mitigation: Earthquake Engineering and
Earthquake Prediction, John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 30.
Anagnos: The Blume Center reports indicate
that early work focused on stochastic or
probabilistic aspects such as exposure, load
combinations, soil-foundation interaction,
dynamic characteristics, seismic hazard
analysis, and risk analysis techniques for
different kinds of structures. Then in 1979,
the Center published STASHA, Computer
Programs for Seismic Hazard Analysis.36 Is this
one place where it all came together?
Shah: We had a group of students working
in the Blume Center over the years who were
providing the foundation of good engineering
and frameworks for looking at risk, risk
management and earthquake resiliency.
Each one was contributing, in their own way,
pieces of the puzzle, which when put together,
help society to better resist negative effects
of earthquakes. STASHA, which stood for
Stanford Seismic Hazard Analysis, brought
much of this work together.
Anagnos: Was anyone else involved in the
development of the seismic hazard research
program?
36 G.A. Guidi, 1979, Computer Programs for Seismic
Hazard Analysis — A User Manual (Stanford Seismic Hazard Analysis — STASHA), John A. Blume
Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 36.
This was later revised to W. Chiang, G.A. Guidi,
C.P. Mortgat, C.C. Schoof, & H.C. Shah, 1984,
Computer programs for seismic hazard analysis: a
user manual (Stanford Seismic Hazard Analysis—
STASHA), John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 62.
33
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Shah: USGS provided tremendous support
in many areas: seismology and geology. They
were very generous in teaching us and letting
us use some of the work that was going on
there. USGS was always a good partner, even
without a formal relationship, their people and
our people worked together all the time.
More importantly, we had contact with the
State Department of Water Resources. They
were concerned about the weakest links in the
California State Water Project, particularly
after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake. Millions of acre-feet of water are transported from
Northern California to Central Valley farmland and multiple areas in Southern California.
All along the 700-mile system there are huge
pumping stations, each one with a very large
switching yard. We performed a risk analysis of
the system with an emphasis on the vulnerable
electrical equipment in the switchyards of the
power and pumping plants.37,38,39 Importantly,
the Department of Water Resources provided
us with State of California funding to understand the behavior of the switching yards.
In particular, we did dynamic testing of 230
37 H.C. Shah, M. Movassate, & T.C. Zsutty, 1976,
Seismic Risk Analysis for California State Water
Project — Reach C. John A. Blume Earthquake
Engineering Center, Report No. 22.
38 H.C. Shah, M. Movassate, & L. Lubetkin, 1976,
Seismic Risk Analysis for California State Water
Project — Reach B. John A. Blume Earthquake
Engineering Center, Report No. 24.
39 A.S. Kiremidjian & H.C. Shah, 1978, Seismic Risk
Analysis for California State Water Project. John
A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 33.
34
KV circuit breakers with and without seismic
isolation of the supporting structure.40
Through the Department of Water Resources,
we met the dam safety program people in
California and then nationally. This developed
into a very successful program to develop and
implement risk-based analysis of existing dams
with funding from FEMA.41,42,43
Partnerships with China
Anagnos: You started the center in 1974, and
not long after, in 1976, the Tangshan earthquake
occurred, which was a shocking event in terms
of damage and loss of life. You and Jim Gere
traveled to Tangshan in summer of 1980. Can you
tell us a little bit about how that trip came about?
Shah: In 1979, in collaboration with EERI,
40 C.A. Kircher, G.C. Delfosse, C.C. Schoof, O.
Khemici, & H.C. Shah, 1979, Performance of a
230 KV ATB 7 Power Circuit Breaker Mounted on
GAPEC Seismic Isolators. John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 40. Note:
Seismic isolation of the support structure of circuit breakers is the first U.S. application of base
isolation to a stucture.
41 R.T. Sewell, 1984, Simplified Seismic Reliability
Analysis on Earth Dams. John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 66.
42 M.W. McCann Jr, J.B. Franzini, E. Kavazanjian
Jr, & H.C. Shah, 1985, Preliminary Safety Evaluation of Existing Dams, Volume I. John A. Blume
Earthquake Engineering Center, Report No. 69.
43 M.W. McCann Jr, J.B. Franzini, E. Kavazanjian
Jr, & H.C. Shah, 1985, Preliminary Safety Evaluation of Existing Dams, Volume II — User Manual.
John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center,
Report No. 70.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
we hosted the Second U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering at Stanford.
It was the tail end of the Cultural Revolution
in China, and we invited some of the top
people in earthquake engineering and building
research in China to that conference. We went
through official channels and invited them,
and to our shock they accepted. It was really
surprising because that was a time when an
official Chinese delegation to the U.S. was
very rare. They came, they attended the full
conference, and they became very good friends
during that conference. During the final
conference meeting, they said they would like
to reciprocate and invite us. We said we would
be delighted, not knowing if we would be
allowed to go there or not.
Anagnos: What was the trip like and what
did you learn?
Shah: Jim and I, and our spouses, went to
China, and they had a 15-city tour arranged
for us. They planned for us to spend three
days in Tangshan. We were the first foreigners
allowed to visit Tangshan. The Chinese were so
embarrassed about the building performance
in Tangshan that they didn’t want foreigners
to visit. It was like a state secret. They did not
want anyone to know how many buildings
fell, how many people died, what kind of
buildings failed, or what was wrong. But when
we went there, it just opened up everything.
They started giving us everything. Jim and
I authored a report about the Tangshan
earthquake when we came back.44 We included
44 J.M. Gere and H.C. Shah, 1981, A visit to Tangshan, China, Earthquake Information Bulletin
(USGS), Vol 13. No. 1.
Chapter 4
a couple of pages about the Tangshan earthquake in the book Jim and I wrote.45 We also
authored an article for the Stanford Daily on
the Tangshan Earthquake.
Communication Barrier
Was Broken
Anagnos: What were some takeaways from
your trip?
Shah: The interesting thing is we didn’t
realize how much research they were doing.
In 1978, George Housner and some of his
colleagues had gone to China, but they were
not allowed to go to Tangshan.46 They went to
China before we did, but we were the first ones
allowed to go to Tangshan. That was the beginning of really understanding how intensely
the Chinese were working on earthquake
engineering. Their research lab at the Institute
of Engineering Mechanics (IEM) in Harbin
was the main center. They were doing research
in Beijing, in Shanghai, and at many universities in China, but the main center was IEM in
Harbin. We visited all the places of interest in
earthquake engineering.
45 J.M. Gere and H.C. Shah, 1984, Terra Non Firma:
Understanding and Preparing for Earthquakes,
Stanford Alumni Association, pp 134–135.
46 Housner discusses this 1978 trip to China in
George W. Housner, Connections, The EERI Oral
History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research
Institute, Oakland, CA, 1997, p. 205. A report
about that trip is also available: P.C. Jennings,
1980, Earthquake Engineering and Hazards Reduction in China: A Trip Report of the American
Earthquake Engineering and Hazards Reduction Delegation. National Academy of Sciences,
CSCPRC Report No. 6.
35
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Anagnos: Were there long-term relationships or collaborations that came out of that
earthquake?
Shah: Once that communication barrier was
broken, it became a flood. There were many,
many American groups going to China, and
Chinese coming here to see us.47 We hosted
many of them.
In fact, Weimin Dong, who became one of my
PhD students and a major developer of RMS,
was part of those collaborations.48 In 1982 he
was selected to come to Stanford, even though
he had no degree because of the Cultural
Revolution. Thanks to Stanford and its
wisdom, they let him come here as a graduate
student. They said, “We don’t only believe in a
piece of paper, but we believe in the knowledge
that he has.”
Anagnos: Did you meet Weimin on that 1980
China trip?
Shah: Yes, I met him at a mechanical
research lab, doing some work among
hundreds of other people. He was one of the
senior people, and we were told by our friend,
the minister for construction, that he was very
smart and had a great future. If possible, they
would like to send him to America, to Stanford.
47 As an example, in September 1980 EERI sent a
delegation, led by John Blume, to China for the
purpose of expanding cooperation in earthquake
engineering. A report of the trip is found in the
EERI January 1982 report, EERI Delegation to
the People’s Republic of China.
48 RMS was the acronym for Risk Management
Solutions (now Moody’s), which is discussed in
detail in Chapter 5.
36
And that’s how he came to Stanford. He came
with two others: Quan Qi and Ibin Bao. The
collaboration with the Chinese was excellent
for many years, and there were many talented
students from China at the Blume Center.
World-wide Partnerships
Borcherdt: The Blume Center had numerous international relationships in addition to
China. Is that correct?
Shah: I had a fantastic relationship with
Japan. I used to go there every six to eight
weeks to learn from them, to talk to them, to
understand them. Japan was doing incredibly
good work, but one of their problems was their
bureaucracy did not allow them to implement
what they knew as quickly as other countries.
To give an example, in Nepal I could go to
the president of the country or the mayor of
Kathmandu and say we need your help. The
next week there will be a note from the president saying, yes, we are going to try this.
When I went to Uganda, Museveni was
president (amazingly, years later he still is
president). He came to a WSSI (World Seismic
Safety Initiative) event. He gave the keynote
lecture about his childhood, and how he
grew up on the great African Rift, where he
used to feel earthquakes. He said he would
do anything and everything that is required,
as recommended by Stanford, to reduce the
seismic risk.
We used methods that would be possible
to implement for a particular region. For
example, we had a very good relationship with
then president of Nicaragua Samoza, and I
consulted with him regularly. When we went to
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
Algeria, the prime minister was my host every
time I went there. The head of the National
Building Safety Lab was a friend, and I still
keep in touch with him. Same with Nepal. In
every country we developed relationships to
make it happen. Even though I’m an academic,
I understood that academia has two important
goals for its research: develop new knowledge,
and make sure that it’s used by society.
Anagnos: When we first started talking
about this oral history, you told us a story about
a scary incident in Algeria that showed the
dangerous side of earthquake engineering.
Shah: I got a project from Algeria, and
I took Chris Mortgat with me, because he
was an expert in hazard and risk analysis,
spoke French and knew the area. Auguste
Boissonade, who was our student, used to work
with a French government organization (CTC)
that helped Algeria with development of codes,
earthquake engineering, wind engineering,
etc. At that time Auguste was on loan by CTC
to Algeria, that is, he was a French engineer
helping Algerians. On weekends, which were
Friday and Saturday, Auguste’s boss Jean
Moulan, Chris and I would go sightseeing.
One Friday, we went from Algiers into the
mountains to a camel fair, where people buy
and sell camels. We spent our day going around
the fair eating and taking many pictures. It was
a natural tourist thing to do. About 4 o’clock
we decided to leave for Algiers. As we were
driving we could see behind us flashing lights.
We didn’t know whether it was police or what.
We moved to one side, and then they moved
with us. We thought maybe they wanted to ask
us some questions. So we stopped and stayed
in the car. It turns out it was a military police.
Chapter 4
They came out with automatic rifles and told
us to get out of the car, all three of us. We got
out of the car and we were told to lie down with
our face down on the pavement, on a freeway,
with those guys pointing guns at us.
Chris and Jean started talking to them. The
police only spoke French, so it was not possible
for me to converse with them. I asked why
are they asking us to do this. Jean said, “They
think we are American spies. They thought we
were taking very secret pictures at the fair.” It
turned out that behind the fair’s fence there
was a big military setup. Of course, we had no
idea. They were watching us as we were taking
pictures. So, they told us to get in the car. With
one car in front of us and one behind us, they
took us to a military prison nearby. There we
were in a military prison. It was January or
February, so it was very cold.
The military police took our passports, our
tickets, and everything important we were
carrying. Then another military policeman
asked Chris for the camera. Then Chris made a
major mistake. He said “We didn’t take any pictures except the camels and the fair” and then
opened the camera and exposed the film. The
military police said, “You see, you destroyed
the evidence. However, we are going to send
the exposed film to Paris. They will find out
what was on it.” He told us it would take about
a week and we would stay in jail.
In the meantime, they looked up that we were
staying in a very good hotel in Algiers. They
looked up our host, for whom we were doing
the work, which was their government, the
political arm of the government. Later on, the
guy for whom we had the project, became a
Prime Minister of Algeria.
37
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
We were really scared. Now at this time, 1975, I
was still an Indian citizen. Chris was a citizen
of Belgium. Jean was a citizen of France.
We had an Indian and Belgian working in
America, and a Frenchman working in Algeria.
At that time Algeria was fighting Spain for the
Spanish Sahara (now called Western Sahara),
and America was helping the Spanish. So, there
was bad blood between Spain and Algeria.
My ticket and Chris’ ticket were to go from
Algiers to Madrid, and then from Madrid to
California, back to Stanford. They said, what
are you as an Indian doing in America? I said,
I teach there. No, this is all fake. So I told them
to call my university. I gave them all the details
about me, and they left. Until now all the
conversation was in French.
A few hours later, a senior military officer
came, and in faultless English he said,
Professor Shah, we are very sorry. We made a
mistake. You are free to go. We checked you
out. Everything you said is correct, so you are
free to go. However, you are deported. I said,
“Chris, we need to pack up, we have to leave.”
But the military guy said to Chris, “Not you.
You stay. You destroyed evidence by exposing
the film, so we want to investigate a little bit
more.” I insisted, “I cannot do that, he’s my
student, he has to go with me.” So they talked
amongst themselves and said, “You are not
going to go to your hotel. We will bring all your
baggage from your hotel to the airport. We will
escort you to the airport, and you go on the
first available flight out of Algeria.”
They took us in their military vehicle to the
airport, and sure enough, all of our bags were
there. The first flight was to Mallorca, and then
from there we went to Madrid. It was a close call.
38
While we were waiting, Jean Moulan said, “You
know, last week the same thing happened to
one of my colleagues, and they shot him. The
military here think that the politicians work for
them. The real power is the military, and the
politicians are put there just for show.” I said,
“Why are you telling us this story? Do you want
to scare us more than we already are scared?”
He said, “I just want you to know that these
people are ruthless.” It was scary.
Anagnos: Did you ever go back to Algeria
after that?
Shah: Oh, many times because they invited
us back. In 1980, for example, when the El
Asnam earthquake occurred, they sent me a
ticket by the Concorde supersonic plane from
here to Washington, and from there to Paris
and from Paris to Algiers.49 And I was in El
Asnam the next day. Oh, yeah, I did a lot of
work in Algeria after that incident.
Impact of the Blume Center
Borcherdt: From a historical perspective, the
Blume Center was established at an important
time and transition for earthquake engineering. The San Fernando earthquake of 1971 had
taken place. The Earthquake Hazard Reduction Act of 1978 had been passed with major
new funding resources allocated for earthquake engineering and earthquake prediction.
You and your colleagues were involved in the
49 Haresh Shah and Vitelmo Bertero led the EERI
reconnaissance team to Algeria which, in cooperation with the Organisme de Contrôle
Technique de la Construction (CTC) of Algeria,
produced the 1983 EERI/NRC report El-Asnam,
Algeria Earthquake of October 10, 1980.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
development of the U.S. National Earthquake
Hazard Research Program (NEHRP). What
are your thoughts on the impact that establishment of the Blume Center had on defining new
directions for research and its applications for
earthquake engineering?
Shah: If you look at the literature at the
time, some of the research was focused on
developing new relationships between spectral
acceleration, spectral velocity, and spectral
displacement, which is not the vibration
itself, but an extract of information from the
vibrations, such as spectra. My thought was,
people in some of these countries don’t even
have a record, how are they going to talk
about earthquake losses by using spectral
acceleration?
As I mentioned earlier, my focus, when I was
active with the Blume Center, was how the
Blume Center could make an impact on losses
around the world. I wanted to develop methods
that were not $10 methods, but instead were
$1 methods. That is, develop much simpler
methods, which use what is available, yet don’t
produce the conclusions that nothing new can
be done. My philosophy was, you can always
do something to make the situation better, that
is, reduce the risk and losses. Where needed,
we used the most fundamental, simple rules
of how to connect earthquake shaking with
losses. Yet in some places we used sophisticated
correlations between the earthquake characteristics (the summary of earthquake vibration,
the soil, the soil structure, and all those things)
with the losses.
I think one of the Blume Center’s biggest
contributions was the concept of moving
ahead with what you have. Don’t wait until you
Chapter 4
catch up with the latest developments at the
top research centers doing cutting edge work
in their field. It was only after about 1985 that
people realized that the world needs a mixture
of methods. At that point, industry said they
cannot wait for sophisticated methods to come
online everywhere. Earthquake insurance
became a global thing only after some of the
work we did was applied from Myanmar to the
San Francisco Bay Area. These assessments
showed that taking the whole picture into
account was important. They showed that
quality of research, quality of knowledge,
amount of knowledge, and socioeconomic
factors are important. The insurance and
reinsurance industries, as well as investment
firms, were quick to realize that these assessments were going to help them.
Borcherdt: It seems that establishment
of the field of seismic risk management and
its application are real legacies of the Blume
Center and RMS.
Shah: As years go by, people will have to
make that judgment. But from my perspective,
I saw that for the Blume Center partners (many
universities, USGS, many small research efforts
around the world, from the smallest schools
in Guatemala to the finest research in China,
India, or the United States), once people were
given a map of a direction to take, they all
started working and collaborating. Perhaps the
Blume Center’s greatest contribution would be
making it possible for any country to develop a
much better understanding of earthquake risk,
even though they are not at the same technological level, or geological and seismological
understanding as the United States or Japan.
39
Chapter 4
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Ted Zsutty:
A Remarkable Colleague
Anagnos: Ted Zsutty, one of Jack Benjamin’s
former students and a professor at San José
State, was an early collaborator of yours, right?
Shah: Now here is one person that stands
out very tall. Ted Zsutty was one of the most
remarkable engineers I’ve ever met, period. He
had such a knack of understanding structures
and their behavior, and besides, he was a lot of
fun. He had the best sense of humor. He and
I traveled to many developing countries, and
we had a lot of problems, but he never stopped
smiling and cracking jokes. He taught me a
lot about codes, how to develop codes, how
to make them understandable by a particular
country, and how to make sure that we use the
latest technology and understanding, while at
the same time applying them in the simplest
way. Ted did not just take the American code or
British code and apply it to a different country.
Instead, he was able to look at those codes and
say, “This will not work in Nicaragua, let us
develop something different.”
Over the ten to 15 years that we worked
together, in every country outside of the U.S.,
he guided us to solutions that were appropriate
and could be applied. Many times, he was
frustrated because we would modify the code
or design guidelines that the stakeholders
would like, but then the legislative body of that
country would make its application voluntary
even though he recommended mandatory use.
We did a lot of good things on the development
of applicable codes, but we were not successful
at the time in making them mandatory. Today,
slowly, some of the seismic codes are being
made mandatory. Even in developing countries
40
there are a few types of structures which are
required to use the code. So, things are improving, but nothing happens quickly.
Personally, I have no patience, but I learned
patience working with the decision makers. For
example, we would develop what we thought
they should implement. They would say, “Okay,
let’s think about it. How about next year?” We
would say, “Hello, Hello! We have finished it.
We want to present it.” And the response was
“No. Next year, six months from now.” To them
time had a different scale than for us. But we
learned.
Foundation for
Risk Management Solutions
Anagnos: I would like to go back to the
development of the seismic hazard methodology, the STASHA computer program, and
later the IRAS risk system.50 Seems like this
research laid the foundation for the development of Risk Management Solutions (RMS).
Shah: Without the kind of support that we
developed over the years at the Blume Center,
it would not have been possible to build a
company like RMS. As an example, RMS
combined all of the work we did at the Blume
Center and put it in a form that society could
use. RMS could be responsible for consulting
and for making sure that it worked, because
in a university we don’t have the resources to
50 W. Dong, J.E. Kim, F.S. Wong, and H. Shah,
1988, A Knowledge-Based Seismic Risk Evaluation
System for the Insurance and Investment Industries (IRAS). Center for Integrated Facility Engineering, Stanford University, Technical Report
No. 5.
Haresh C. Shah • Earthquake Engineering at Stanford
Chapter 4
take that responsibility. Typically, we do the
research and disseminate it through presentations and publications, and that’s the end of it.
However, the Stanford Office of Technology
Licensing felt the work we were doing was
very important and encouraged us to put it
into practice. They wanted to help us create a
company.
41
Chapter 5
Risk Management
Solutions
Really it is the Blume Center students who, one page
at a time, taught the world what earthquake risk and
earthquake risk management are.
RMS Was Not Planned
Anagnos: You mentioned that, way back when, the only kind of
risk analysis that was being done was in the business world. Now
we talk about risk analysis for earthquake, wind, flood, and fire.
RMS is part of that revolution. Your students’ research helped
develop that foundation. How did that finally come together and
result in RMS?
Shah: RMS was not planned, it just evolved. RMS is the work
of our Blume Center. Mainly students, all of them. Unfortunately,
they could not benefit and get the reward of their contribution.
Really it is the Blume Center students who, one page at a time,
taught the world what earthquake risk and earthquake risk management are. It is the work of giants like Rosenblueth and Cornell,
people at MIT, and some very innovative young people in the
investment banking area who I came to know over the years. It was
43
Chapter 5
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
a mixture of many things and many people’s
contributions.
We had done a lot of work around the world.
I had worked with investment banks, and
learned how desperate they were to monetize
earthquake risk. Aetna insurance company
and Solomon Brothers said to us, “You have
done work in many countries about risk and
risk management, let’s work together.” They
became our partners. Between ’83 and about
’87, they taught us the insurance business, such
as how they work, how they monetize risk,
and what is of interest to them. We learned a
lot from them, and in return, we showed them
what we were doing. They were very interested,
so these two companies gave a research project
to Stanford, with me as principal investigator.
Consequently, the Blume Center’s sources of
funding really increased: state government,
U.S. and foreign companies, international
organizations, National Science Foundation,
and FEMA.
Weimin Dong was one of the research
students. Over the years, there were so many
fantastic people on this: Chris Mortgat, Anne
Kiremidjian, Auguste Boissonade. Through
osmosis we learned a lot. Slowly we approached
a realization of a very amorphous idea of
what the industry needed to improve risk
management.
Loma Prieta Revealed
the Need to Form a Company
Shah: Then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake occurred, and I talked to the Stanford
Office of Technology Licensing. They have
helped many Stanford faculty form companies
and create alliances between Stanford and
44
those companies. They were amazing. They
were so good. I had no idea how this whole
thing worked. So, they took me under their
wing and showed me how to do it.
Anagnos: You and your son Hemant were
running a Silicon Valley startup.
Shah: Right. They held our hand, helped us
start up, and create a company. Because of all
the help, they had investment in it, and we collectively decided to name it Risk Management
Software [later it became Risk Management
Solutions]. The ’89 earthquake suddenly made
many insurance, reinsurance companies and
investment banks come to us and say, “Can we
be part of this?”
And without knowing what they were going to
get, they provided some funding. Not a whole
lot, but some funding. They were not investors,
but they were funders of getting the company
going. Before we knew it, in couple of years we
had enough critical mass that Stanford said,
you can do well now on your own. So, Stanford
got out.
Anagnos: You know what year it was that
Stanford got out?
Shah: I think they bought out in ’92 or
’93, something like that. Hemant formed the
company and became the first vice president.51
His first hire was Weimin Dong. The two of
them worked hard.
51 Hemant Shah, Haresh’s son, co-founded the
company and led RMS until 2018. In 2019 he
founded Archipelago, a data network for insurance brokers and providers.
Haresh C. Shah • Risk Management Solutions
Hiring Talent to Grow RMS
Anagnos: How did RMS pick a CEO?
Shah: In 1990, Sutter Hill Ventures wanted
to invest. Their condition was we get a CEO.
Hemant was still a student. He was 22 years
old, just finishing his master’s degree. Since
Weimin was from communist China, they
didn’t think that he had the knowledge to grow
an American company. They recommended
a person, Tom Hutton, who was heading the
McKinsey office in Los Angeles. If we could
convince him to come, they would give us
enough funding to pay him. He was introduced to us, and we explained our concept.
After some time, he decided it was a great
opportunity, and he became the CEO. We were
fortunate, Tom is a very bright guy, an incredibly good strategist and strong analyst. We all
learned quite a bit from him.
Anagnos: Who were some of the other key
people that RMS hired to help and why did you
bring them on board?
Shah: You know, RMS over the years
brought in some incredible people, very smart
people and collectively, they did a fantastic job.
But I will keep the discussion to people from
Stanford. I’ll start with Weimin Dong who was
there from the beginning and was the Chief
Risk Officer.
Chris Mortgat became VP of Modeling. He was
a consultant on the risk management tools and
the hazard and risk management modeling.
He helped out anyone who was having trouble
understanding what’s going on. Then there
was Auguste Boissonade, PhD from Stanford,
who became VP of Probabilistic Modeling. He
was working on specific models for different
Chapter 5
parts of the world and different markets. Fouad
Bendimerad, another Stanford PhD, became
VP and Chief Scientist. Mohsen Rahnama was
Helmut Krawinkler’s PhD student, and served
as kind of a chief structural engineer and
design person who later became the Chief Risk
Modeling Officer. Brilliant fellow, very good,
very level-headed.
Then there was, Pane Stojanovski, VP of Model
Development Operations. Pane came to Stanford as a Fulbright post-doc. He did his PhD in
Skopje, Macedonia. He was a very senior fellow
who was doing modeling and consulting and
helping younger people understand what to do.
Surya Gunturi, another Stanford PhD, became
Director of Model Development Operations.
All these people continued working on things
similar to what they did at the Blume Center.
Paul VanderMarck was an all-rounder who
became the Chief Product Officer. He was a
person who could explain to the clients the
complexities of the model and how to interpret
their results. He was in marketing, but really
a chief technical person who understood the
modeling to help the clients understand what
they were doing.
Anagnos: As I recall, Paul was one of the
recipients of the EERI Shah Family Prize for
Innovation, wasn’t he?
Shah: Correct, he received the Shah Family
Innovation Prize in 2003. I was Paul’s advisor
when he was an undergraduate getting his
bachelor’s degree. Then he was my advisee
when he got his master’s degree. After his
master’s, I said, “Paul, why don’t you join RMS
and you’ll enjoy working with them.”
45
Chapter 5
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
There was a time when the technical side of
RMS was run by Stanford engineers. Then we
brought in some other Stanford people from
the School of Business, our Chief Financial
Officer was Steve Robertson, who believe it
or not, was a roommate of Weimin when they
were students.
There are too many to remember, but this gives
you a picture of how heavily RMS, the Blume
Center and Stanford were closely tied. And I
would say that RMS helped Stanford students
and Stanford students helped RMS.
Anagnos: You had to have technical talent.
You had to have people who could run the
company and manage the company, and you
had to have people who could help you with
marketing and working with the clients. You
had to have a very broad spectrum of people.
Shah: A huge spectrum of people who understood everything from finance to marketing
to technology to mathematics to statistics
to sales. There was a time, at the turn of the
century, when RMS was hiring more Stanford
civil engineering graduates, than any other
employer. Students who wanted to work in a
field other than design and construction, came
to RMS. We created a whole new opportunity
for our students. Because of RMS, there were
so many other companies that were created
and they all started hiring Stanford graduates
because most of the know-how for the insurance industry was residing in the Stanford
students.
Attracting Potential Clients
Anagnos: As you grew from this little
company—just you, Hemant, Weimin and
Tom—to an enormous company, what were
some highlights of early projects, or milestones
that were momentous for the development of
RMS?
Shah: The highlight for the initial years was
to show what we were doing, and convince
potential clients that it was something that was
new and innovative. To convince them that we
were creating a workable model that combined
hazard, vulnerability and exposure in a
statistical, consistent manner so that we could
estimate what the damage would be to their
portfolio in the event of an earthquake.
Anagnos: Did you start with a single insurance company, or did you have your software
and then you just went out and started marketing it?
Shah: The latter. Hemant and Weimin would
pack up their PC in their car and go to various
companies that I knew through my contacts.
I knew quite a few people in the industry. So
I would set up a meeting for them to go and
explain. They were very clever. Initially, they
started hiring some of the people from those
companies, because they were excited that
this was something new, and they wanted to
work with us. Hemant, Weimin and Tom said,
“Why don’t you join us? Maybe you can tell us
something about what your company needs
and we can help you.” So, they created mutually beneficial dynamics between the employer,
employee and the client.
Anagnos: Who were your first clients?
46
Haresh C. Shah • Risk Management Solutions
Shah: Initially, a few small companies who
were willing to take the risk said they would
join us and take a chance. We offered, for a
reduced fee, to work together and see how we
could develop the model for real issues the
company was facing. This continued for a
while, and while we were doing that, we realized that insurance companies are good clients
but they are small, relatively speaking. They are
not capable of paying sufficiently, because their
portfolio is local by definition.
I came to know the CEO and the chairman of
the board of American Re, based in Princeton.
His name was Ed Jobe. I told him, “You insure
many insurance companies. You depend on
their modeling and their ability to insure.
Don’t you want that portfolio to be robust so
that you don’t lose your shirt?” We tried to
convince a few reinsurance companies like
that, starting with America Re. He said, let’s
do it, and he became our client. Suddenly we
became big, because those clients had huge
portfolios. Many insurance companies were
insured by American Re.
When that happened, Munich Re said, hey,
why don’t we do it? Then Swiss Re. There was
a time when every reinsurance company of
the world was a client of RMS. Companies I
had never heard of became clients of RMS,
because they all realized that they were falling
behind. They better find out what’s going on
in America. That is when the business of RMS
became a real business, when the reinsurance
companies joined.
Chapter 5
RMS Becomes a Global Company
Anagnos: Then you had to open some offices
outside of the country.
Shah: We opened many offices. For example,
Palo Alto, that was the headquarters. We had
offices in Chicago, New York, Vancouver, and
Toronto. Then we had offices in London, Paris,
Munich, and Zurich.
Then going further east, we had an office in
Delhi. We had more than 4,000 people in the
Delhi office doing GIS. That’s all they did. For
example, we digitized all the flood maps of the
United States. For Toyota Motors, we created
the GPS driving maps and we digitized every
street, everything for many countries. GIS was
something we were doing night and day. We
used to have three shifts in Delhi, and they
were working 24 hours a day. At one time we
had 12,000 people in Delhi office. We didn’t
think of GIS as a separate thing, but as part of
understanding what’s going on.
We had offices in Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo,
Sydney, and Auckland. Tokyo was a big office.
I created a partnership Oyo-RMS in Tokyo, a
whole company with Oyo Corporation. At one
time, we had more than a hundred people. I
had to create a new position of a CEO in Tokyo,
because it was so big. All the Japanese reinsurers wanted to be our clients.
These are just the big offices with maybe 60
to 80 people. Then we had locations where
some people wanted to work remotely. We had
maybe 20 or 30 locations, where somebody had
a home office with a couple of employees. We
were fine with that. One guy had a house on the
slope of one of the volcanoes in Hawaii, and
he worked from his home there. Why not? We
47
Chapter 5
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
were very innovative. We were pro-employees,
because if they were happy, they would do good
job. We gave them lots of freedom, and this was
way before COVID changed the way people
work.
needed to grow, and therefore it grew by itself.
The only thing the management did was to
make sure that they listened to the right advice.
We guided it in the right direction, but the
ideas were not exclusively ours.
RMS grew by itself because of the good people.
The idea was at the perfectly right time,
because suddenly insurers realized that they
were losing a lot of money in every earthquake
event anywhere. We didn’t stay local.
Earthquakes occur everywhere all the time.
Somebody’s losing something every year on
earthquakes. And that insurer is not the only
one who loses, but the reinsurer in America
who has insured that insurance company in
that country also loses. So it became a global
business.
Borcherdt: Later it expanded to all kinds of
catastrophes.
Borcherdt: It seems that RMS was well positioned when the 1994 Northridge earthquake
revealed a major vulnerability in the insurance
industry and the need for major improvements
in estimation of monetary risk.
Shah: Let me comment on this obliquely.
Many startups fail, not because they don’t have
a good idea, but because of the arrogance and
the fear of founders. Fortunately, Hemant and
I had absolutely no ego about starting RMS.
We were aware that we knew very little about
the whole field of venture capital, or funding
and starting a company, so we always listened,
analyzed, and even gave up lots of shares to get
the right person who could help. This realization that you need experts to do something
good is what makes a company successful.
It is interesting to note that contributions from
many people created RMS. RMS in return
grew with the founders, who let it grow where it
48
Shah: We took on other perils because of
requests from insurance companies, mainly
reinsurers, that we start modeling hurricane
and flood. So those came a little later on. But it
was really anchored first around earthquakes,
then hurricanes. There was a time when
hurricane modeling dominated, because they
occurred every year, and billions of dollars
were lost due to hurricanes in the Gulf Coast
and U.S. and in Asia. Japanese companies were
losing a lot of money in Asia due to hurricanes.
Australian companies were losing a lot of
money. We could not think about only America
as a client. We had to think about the world.
And, we were good at it because we are a global
people.
HAZUS Development
Anagnos: Roger and I both worked on
HAZUS.52 Roger performed oversight on the
Project Work Group, and I worked from the
very beginning with Hemant and others on
the model development. Why did RMS get
involved in that project?
52 Hazards US (HAZUS) began as an earthquake
loss estimation platform for the U.S. managed by
FEMA. It later expanded to include floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes.
Haresh C. Shah • Risk Management Solutions
Shah: It wasn’t part of our strategic plan
for the growth of RMS. We weren’t keen to go
for the project. The main reason being that
the budget was very small compared to the
budgets we were used to with reinsurance
companies. Secondly, the scope of work was
not well defined. When the scope of work isn’t
clear, you are in trouble. You do everything,
and then the funder says you didn’t do
something. We would respond with you didn’t
tell us that you were interested in it. So we do
the something, and then somebody in their
oversight committee will say, but you left this
out. There is no end to it.
Anagnos: Roger, didn’t you help write that
scope of work?
Borcherdt: I can remember this a little bit.
[He laughs.]
Shah: Management evaluated the pros and
cons of this. We knew all the cons. Some of us
listed the pros. We said you must remember
that you are part of the American ecosystem.
The government and its funding agencies,
industry, and researchers know what you are
capable of doing. Even if the scope of work
is ill-defined, it is the right thing to do. Start
with an assumption that this is a money loser.
Which came true, RMS did lose money.
Borcherdt: I think RMS taking on this
initial project really set the stage for HAZUS.
FEMA’s objective at that point was to come up
with a standardized loss estimation procedure
that they could use for estimating losses of
future earthquakes. I was on the steering committee, and we were talking about how is this
going to be implemented. I said, “I happen to
know a company that is doing just this.” RMS
Chapter 5
had already developed software for modeling
earthquake losses for the insurance industry.
Then RMS came in and they combined their
technical knowledge along with developing
new methodologies and databases to create a
GIS-based system that grew into HAZUS.53
RMS Investors
Anagnos: What prompted you to sell RMS?
Shah: You know, we never sold RMS. The
concept of selling versus getting more investment is very different. Ever since I founded
RMS, we did not even dream of having the
kind of money that would be needed to make
it a global company. You talk to people who
understand the potential and they ask if they
can be your partner. We would say, “You can
be a partner, but it will cost you.” This is called
investment.
The first investment was me. I was alone,
because the other two partners were Hemant
and Weimin, and they didn’t have the money.
My capacity was limited. When we reached the
point where we wanted to hire Tom Hutton,
paying big bucks, we went to Sutter Hill, a
venture capital firm in Palo Alto. We showed
them our business model, and they agreed with
us that this had huge potential. They said they
would give us capital, but in return we had to
give them a specified amount of the company.
We said fine. Their money was as important
as our intellectual contribution. So they came
53 The development of HAZUS is also discussed in
Robert V. Whitman, Connections, The EERI Oral
History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research
Institute, Oakland, CA, 2009, p. 73–75.
49
Chapter 5
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
in and, over time, we went from owning 100%
of RMS to a point where we were owning
maybe 50%. The remaining 50% was owned
by investors. Then in ’93 or so, Sutter Hill said
it is the time to can cash in their investment.
In response, we brought in a bigger investor.
Morgan Stanley came in big because they
understand insurance, reinsurance, investment banking and so on. They bought Sutter
Hill’s shares plus some of our shares, and
invested. So it was not selling, they bought in.
We needed money to grow.
After some time, for a variety of reasons, we
needed to bring in an independent investor
who was not involved in the insurance industry. We looked far and wide and found Daily
Mail, in London. They had a division that was
trying to find a big investment in Silicon Valley.
We interviewed them, we talked to them, we
understood them and we realized that they
were the perfect new investors. We convinced
them to buy out Morgan Stanley completely,
and we also sold a few more shares to them,
because there were still young people like
Weimin, Hemant, Tom Hutton and few others,
who could use the cash. We owned quite a
few shares, so we also sold some, but they
essentially bought out Morgan Stanley.
Daily Mail remained as co-investors and were
the biggest investors in RMS until 2017. We
created an equation for the price of a share.
Based on that equation, in 2017 they bought us
out. I got away earlier. I retired from RMS in
2005, and RMS India in 2007.
Anagnos: Can you explain the difference
between RMS and RMS India?
50
Shah: RMS India was a wholly owned
subsidiary of RMS. RMS owned some portion
of RMS India, I owned some portion of RMS
India and the general managers of the India
office owned some portion. RMS owned a
major share of RMS India, but RMS was
owned by another group of investors. So it was
complicated.
Evolution of an Idea
Borcherdt: As I recall, the core idea or
basic concept of developing solutions to risk
management problems emanated from you and
Hemant.
Shah: My concept was that we needed to do
something in my profession to bring in other
areas to help reduce risk. We didn’t know a lot
of things. We just happened to be at the right
place at the right time, thinking about the right
issue and knowing that all around us were
some great people. Let’s bring all of that talent,
their thought processes and minds together
and create something, and it worked.
You know, the risk of a community, of an urban
area, is a civil engineering problem. It’s not
a business problem. It is not a statistician’s
problem. It is a problem in which we as civil
engineers make an urban community livable.
One aspect is, you have to make it safe, or at
least minimize risk. You need to look at how
much risk you are taking versus how much it
costs you to mitigate that risk. We brought that
into the equation and we showed them how to
do it. The software that was developed showed
not only that you are in a danger zone, but what
you can do to minimize your personal risk in
terms of monetary loss. Next that evolved from
monetary loss to personal safety, better codes,
Haresh C. Shah • Risk Management Solutions
better building centers, identification of areas
you should not build. But originally everybody,
especially insurance companies, was worried
about the quantification of monetary risk.
Borcherdt: It seems to me that the
innovative spirit at RMS was a key factor in
its success. During the 70’s and 80’s seismic
zonation maps that delineate potential earth
science hazards were being published by
the USGS, but incorporating them in a GIS
(Geographic Information System) with maps of
the built environment to develop estimates of
monetary risk for the insurance industry was a
pioneering effort that helped set the stage for a
new emerging industry.
Shah: I want to impress upon you that there
were a lot of creative minds behind what we
see today. Dr. Weimin Dong’s innovative
work really helped RMS take technological
leadership.
Anagnos: Haresh, it seems like it’s more than
just civil engineers involved making a community safe. You have to have the sociological
side, the economic side, the medical side, our
earth science friends, like Roger here. Safety is
a multidisciplinary problem. You mentioned
civil engineers, but I feel that one of the big
strengths of this innovation was bringing
together all of these different disciplines and
talking together about how they impact one
another.
Shah: That is very true. Because we were at
Stanford, a lot of people were willing to talk to
us, even though they were not engineers, and
we were willing to talk to them, even though
they had backgrounds in sociology or psychology or urban planning. We all learned quite a
Chapter 5
bit from each other. I would go to conferences
where every paper was, the concept of risk,
voluntary risk, involuntary risk, risk of this
or that. Never engineering. But it was an eye
opener that, my goodness, the word risk is so
loaded and complicated. Depends who and
where and context and so on. And all that had
to go into creating what we did with RMS.
Anagnos: Let’s go back to the 2000-foot level
in our discussion. Catastrophe risk modeling
has grown to a somewhat mature field. There
are companies and practitioners all over the
world that are doing this. Now we’re seeing
this kind of modeling for wildfires and climate
change. It seems to me that there’s been a huge
impact on the way we think about catastrophe
risk. What do you think the impact has been
and what do you think is the future of catastrophe risk modeling?
Shah: I think you are right. The future is
looking at wildfires, as an example. If you look
at the most recent models of wildfires, they
are built using exactly the pieces that we use
for earthquake or hurricane or floods. That
is, the way we go about looking at all major
catastrophes and bringing in finance, urban
resilience and urban stability. We use the same
concepts: How does nature perform? That
is hazard. What is the human interaction or
value in terms of exposure? And what is the
vulnerability in terms of weaknesses with
respect to the hazard? Every single catastrophe
model is built around these three concepts and
combines them seamlessly so that eventually
we understand what is our option for making
a decision. Such as, do we get out of that area,
do we insure it, what do we do, what are our
options? To evaluate those options, we need to
51
Chapter 5
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
understand the risk. And this risk is something
we created, not for an individual structure, not
for an individual like you or me, but for the
society. That thinking did not exist until we
came around.
Anagnos: It seems to have completely
changed the way that people think about
catastrophes. Like you said, once you combine
those three concepts, you can start using the
results for decision making. Where do we put
our resources? What are the most important
interventions that we can apply?
52
Shah: It’s very simple actually. Complicated
in the details, but simple conceptually. That
we need to understand these three things
interacting with each other to understand a
risk. Intuitively, we always knew that. We didn’t
know how to put it together.
Chapter 6
Leadership In
Civil Engineering
… if we all work together, we will be stronger than
the sum of the individuals. … That was the Blume
Center. That was CIFE, and that was the same with
many other things that I did as a faculty member.
Stanford Leadership Beyond the Blume Center
Anagnos: You have a history of going beyond being a professor at
Stanford to establish long-term programs with broader engineering
applications. Can you tell us about some of these activities?
Shah: After the Blume Center was well established, I moved
from being its director to Chair of the Civil Engineering Department. My thinking and my goals were a little different as a chair
than they were as a Blume Center Director. I like to build, but I
wanted to first study the situation. If it is not broken, why repair
it? So, when I became a chair, I wanted to look at our department
and see where we could make it more accessible to all the partners
around the world.
I’m a global guy. I do not think in terms of Stanford-only or
California-only or U.S.-only, because Stanford gets our students
53
Chapter 6
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
from all over the world. I, as an example, came
from India and there are many such foreign
born students around the country. The head
of Google is an Indian. The head of Microsoft
is an Indian. So there are many, many, many
very good, smart people coming from all over
the world. So why not talk to them, and be a
partner with them, and work with them?
Jim Gibbons, the School of Engineering Dean,
and I thought very much alike at the time we
were in our leadership roles.54 I discussed with
Jim why we were trying to raise money only in
the U.S., and that we should expand our efforts
to raise money from all our alumni or their
families around the world. There is plenty of
money, not just in the U.S., but everywhere.
Jim agreed. Then we focused on where wealth
was. The wealth in Japan and in Asia was in
the construction business. Some of the world’s
largest construction companies were in Japan
and in Germany.
Endowed Professorships Funded
Shah: We looked up who from these companies had been educated at Stanford and noted a
few. We decided to focus on the elder Obayashi.
First, his son was a student at Stanford in our
construction program. We talked to him over
many meetings, many trips to Japan. We told
him that it was his responsibility to create
something at Stanford that would keep his
legacy in America and give opportunities to
the many engineers in his companies, like the
54 James F. Gibbons (1931 –) earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University
(1956) and then joined the electrical engineering
in 1957. He served as Dean of the School of Engineering from 1984 to 1996.
54
opportunities his son got. We convinced him,
and that resulted in the Obayashi Professorship in the School of Engineering.
Jim and I went to Japan around 50 times over
five years. Makoto Watabe was a top professor
at the University of Tokyo and a researcher
in earthquake engineering whom I had met
previously. Professor Watabe was a senior
consultant to Shimizu, and also ran their
research program after his retirement from
University of Tokyo. He helped us connect
with the president of Shimizu Company, and
Shimizu donated funds for another Civil
Engineering professorship.
I met the president of Kumagai Gumi, who
endowed the Kumagai Professorship. So we
got to know quite a few companies in Japan.
They all gave us funding, not just funding, but
a huge amount of funding. When I became
department chair, we were the poorest department in the whole School of Engineering, with
just a couple of endowed chairs. When I left, we
were the richest department in the School of
Engineering.
Center for Integrated
Facility Engineering
Shah: Some of the money I raised was for
CIFE (Center for Integrated Facility Engineering) and the idea was to bring high-power
computing into civil engineering. So even
though Kumagai Gumi was a civil engineering
endowed chair, we selected a professor in
computer science to have that chair.
Borcherdt: What was the research focus of
CIFE?
Haresh C. Shah • Leadership In Civil Engineering
Shah: When I became chair, the construction group within the department had five
people who were very innovative, but each
doing their own thing. Construction is a
complex problem that requires collaboration
all the way from the soil mechanics and
foundations, to structural, to the critical
path method, to economics, to materials, to
plumbing, you name it. You are developing a
system. I brought all the construction faculty
together and said, “Tell me how we can develop
a research center to make the construction
business come together and look at the bigger
picture.” The construction faculty and I agreed
that if I could raise the money, they would set
up a center like the Blume Center. That center
was called the Center for Integrated Facility
Engineering (CIFE).
I wanted to change the construction group
culture, so I hired Dr. Paul Teicholz from
industry as CIFE director. He, using the
funding I brought in from large construction
companies from around the world, managed
CIFE. It really became one of the top groups
of people working in the construction
industry. CIFE looks at how to make the whole
project work like a machine, like a system. For
example, logistics, how does everything work
together? CIFE is supposed to bring all this
from the lowest technology to highest technology together into one working system.
Borcherdt: I remember the excitement about
CIFE. It was very innovative as it brought
together various aspects of a discipline to
address the whole problem.
Chapter 6
with that. They did important research, but it
did not do enough to change the way the world
was working. I wanted to take our research to
the world, but to do that we needed to develop
a system that industry could adopt. To give it
to them, we had to develop it ourselves first.
The Blume Center focused on developing
earthquake risk management systems. CIFE
was aimed at how to develop an integrated
facility engineering system.
Borcherdt: Was it about developing a
computer platform with software to address
various aspects of the problem?
Shah: Yes. I wanted to plant the idea that if
we all work together, we will be stronger than
the sum of the individuals, because it really
works. I learned that from statistics. If you take
five buildings at separate locations and insure
each one individually, your cost is very high.
On the other hand, if you own all five buildings
and insure them as one risk, the cost is about
15 to 20%. Your money goes much further
in managing that risk if you put all of them
together, because the likelihood is very low that
something is going to happen to all five at the
same time. An insurance company will insure
all five of my properties for a much lower
premium than for five individual properties.
Similarly, if five professors work together to
create a system, it is much more valuable to
society than each one working individually.
That was the Blume Center. That was CIFE,
and that was the same with many other things
that I did as a faculty member.
Shah: Unlike medicine or physics, engineers
traditionally worked as individual professors
completing their research. Nothing wrong
55
Chapter 6
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Computerizing the Building
Process
Borcherdt: You came up with so many
innovative ideas and approaches.
Borcherdt: Did you set up a company to do
just that? Was it called Buildfolio?
Shah: It was a problem, an age-old problem
of running out of time. Too many things to
do and limited time at hand. That’s why I
left Stanford early, because RMS along with
Stanford was getting to be just too much. I
just could not handle it. I was never available.
I was always on the plane. You must give up
something, so I gave up Stanford. I was 60
when I left Stanford in December 31, 1997.
Shah: You see, construction people were
doing their purchasing and acquisition of
materials from many individual companies,
which was a very cumbersome process.
That is why you needed a lot of people in a
construction project to acquire things at a good
discount. I thought, why don’t we develop a
company, like Amazon, that has computerized
everything needed in the building process,
from a bulb to a pipe, to a screw, to a nail, to a
whatever.
During the first two years of that company we
were just collecting data in terms of nomenclature and descriptions for construction materials. We gave a name to everything and entered
it in a database. The idea was if a company
needed to order something, they would go
to the company database and say that our
building is so many square feet, has so many
rooms, has so many floors, and the company
was supposed to estimate how many nails, how
many pipes, how many bulbs, how many wires,
and how much concrete they would need. And
they could order directly on a computer all that
from one source, to make it easier and cheaper.
When I started that, I thought, why can’t I do
something similar for earthquakes? That’s
how RMS came about. My expertise was
earthquake engineering and not building
construction, so I focused more on RMS. I sold
Buildfolio to some people in Singapore and did
not pursue it after that.
56
Anagnos: I heard that you had so many
miles flying that they painted your name on an
airplane.
Shah: Yes, Pan Am had a frequent flyer
program where if you had a certain number of
miles, you would get your name on the wing
for one month. And my name was on one of the
Pan Am planes because I had so many miles.
Anagnos: I counted 48 PhD students
and another 14 Engineer’s Degree students
under your mentorship. Wow, that is quite a
contribution.
Mentor For
Many Women Students
Anagnos: I want to point out another very
important contribution you made. You had
women PhD students at a time when there
were very, very few women in the field: Anne
Kiremidjian, Elisabeth Pate, Joy Pauschke.
Shah: Many people do not know that even
before Anne, Elisabeth, and Joy, there was
another woman from Argentina who was
doing a PhD at Stanford. I was responsible
for recruiting her. But later she did her PhD
Haresh C. Shah • Leadership In Civil Engineering
Chapter 6
Table 1 – Graduate Students Supervised by Haresh Shah
phd students
1965
1967
1968
1969
1970
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1978
1979
1980
1981
John A. Lepore (Penn)
John A. Burnes (Penn)
T.Y. Chow (Penn)
Pradyot K. Niyogi (Penn)
Masaru Hoshiya
Wilson Tang
Kennon D. Vaudrey
Sylva Bolduc
K. Steven Ott
Gerhard Schueller
Frederick A. Webster
Jagat Dalal
Victor Vagliente
Ram B. Kulkarni
Kenichi Ukaji
Charles A. Kircher
Christian P. Mortgat
Anne S. Kiremidjian
Elisabeth Pate-Cornell
Jean Savy
Shayan Pazargadi
Martin McCann
Milton DeHerrera
Omar Khemici
Joy M. Pauschke
Jean-Lou Chameau
1982
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1992
1993
1994
1997
1999
2003
Hector Monzon-Despang
Ben Tilliouine
João Azevedo
Auguste Boissonade
Jorma K. Arros
Craig Schoof
M. Fouad Bendimerad
Weimin Dong
Vahid Sotoudeh
I-Kwang Chang
Howard K. Thurston
Wei Ling Chiang
Michele Lamarre
Glenn H. Miyasato
Mohan Sharma
Said Salah-Mars
Surya Kumar Gunturi
Gregory L.F. Chiu
Anju Gupta
Rachel Davidson
Abhijit Kakhandiki
T. L. Murlidharan
engineer degr ee students
1969
1970
1973
1977
K. Steven Ott
Gerhard Schueller
Frederick A. Webster
Yung Hoon Yu
Charles A. Kircher
Francisco Silva
John O. Dizon
Robert B. Narver
1979
1980
1981
1982
1988
Gino A. Guidi
John T. Egbert
Omar Khemici
Robert Yibirin
Richard J. Nielsen
Robert T. Sewell
57
Chapter 6
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
in engineering mechanics, good for her, and
she went back to Argentina and taught in a
university. When I came to Stanford in 1968;
there were no women PhD students in civil
engineering.
You know, I come from a family of four sisters.
My father used to say that he is going to educate
every one of them, and he instilled in me that
if you educate a woman, you educate a whole
future generation of families. I believe that. In
fact, I’ve set up a foundation, called The Emelie
Foundation, that supports women in India
who are poor and cannot go to college for some
reason. For example, they are the daughters
of single mothers, and because they need to
bring in income, they cannot get an education.
The Emelie was my father’s business, so after
he passed away, I set up a foundation in his
memory.
I always wanted to make sure that we give an
opportunity to women. Who is going to stop me
if I take a woman who is extremely qualified, but
not recognized enough and tell her, “I’ll work
with you, and I’ll support you.” Who is going to
say no? That is how I started. You know, start
at the individual level, and then others see it. I
have set up a few schools in India, and you know
who the top of the class is? Always a girl. Always,
no exception. They are very smart, they are
diligent, but somehow society did not want to
recognize it, accept it, or admit it.
At Stanford I did not wait for anyone to tell
me about affirmative action or anything, I just
did it. I started accepting women as my PhD
students. And later there were quite a few. You
know, if you break the barrier, then others see
that it doesn’t make sense not to do it. So they
do it, and before you know it, it becomes the
58
norm. The ’60s and ’70s were changing times,
lots of changes occurred.
California Universities for
Research in Earthquake
Engineering (CUREE)
Anagnos: Let’s talk about CUREE as
another foundational organization that
catapulted earthquake engineering forward.
I’m saying something you already know, but
before CUREE it seemed as if everyone was
siloed. People were doing their own research
then putting their data in their filing cabinets
rather than freely sharing it with one another.
With CUREE , suddenly you had this growth
in cross-institutional collaboration. What
prompted this major change?
Shah: The formation of CUREE has a
strange history. In the 1980s UC Berkeley,
Stanford, Caltech, and a few other universities in California, submitted a joint proposal
to the National Science Foundation to create
a national center on earthquake engineering
on the west coast. Others from the East
Coast, and in the Midwest also submitted
proposals. We were very cocky. We thought,
who is going to beat California with all of us
working together? Because we were cocky,
in my opinion we didn’t do a good job in
submitting the proposal. We did not do our
homework well, and for whatever reason, we
lost. The center went to the east coast and
was established as the National Center for
Earthquake Engineering Research (NCEER)
headquartered at the University at Buffalo in
1986.
All of us kicked ourselves and said, how did
this happen? Our response was that we must
Haresh C. Shah • Leadership In Civil Engineering
synergize our intellectual and physical resources
in California. We all agreed that we would create
California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREe). Later, it changed
the name to Consortium of Universities for
Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE)
when universities from outside of California
joined.55
When CUREE was formed, we had to figure
out what we could offer as a package, jointly!
So CUREE created an environment and a
platform by which we could share who is doing
what and researchers would talk to each other.
The silos were not broken down, but they put
a door in each silo so you could go through it,
and that helped over the years.
I must say, Berkeley and Caltech did a
fantastic job of promoting CUREE . Bruce
Bolt and Bill Iwan were key players along
with Housner, Donald Hudson and Clarence
Allen from Caltech.56 The Blume Center was
a later entrant. They did a fantastic job of
55 CURE e incorporated as a non-profit public benefit organization on March 1, 1988. The eight founding university members were California Institute
of Technology, Stanford University, University of
Southern California, and University of California
campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, and San Diego. It later changed its acronym to
CUREE when other universities joined.
56 Bruce Alan Bolt (1930–2005) was a professor
of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley
(1963–1993) and served as director of the Berkeley Seismological Stations (1963–1989). His many
contributions include development of robust
methodologies to estimate earthquake epicenters, modeling of seismic wave propagation, and
strong-motion array development.
Chapter 6
bringing everyone together and agreeing on
a vision. Later on, we all learned quite a bit
from each other. Bill Iwan was the founding
President (1988–1991). I was President from
1992 to 1993, then Steve Mahin (1994–1996),
Helmut Krawinkler (1997–1998), and so on. It
was a good thing to bring everyone together
to understand, collectively, what our greatest
strengths were and that we could attract
funding to CUREE as a joint effort more
effectively than we could individually.
CUREE’s Major Projects
Anagnos: CUREE was responsible for some
major transformational projects like the SAC
Joint Venture Project and the CUREE-Caltech
Woodframe Project.57
Shah: There were quite a few projects. For
example, the CUREE-Kajima Joint Research
Program, which went on for 20 years,
intended to bring Japanese technology and
industry into American university research.
That is, some of the very complex issues
brought by the Japanese megacompanies
were tackled by various researchers within
the CUREE consortium in collaboration
with Japanese researchers. Bill Iwan was very
much involved in initiating the collaboration
57 The SAC Joint Venture was a partnership of the
Structural Engineers Association of California
(SEAOC), Applied Technology Council (ATC),
and California Universities for Research in
Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) to address
performance problems with welded steel moment frame connections discovered following
the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
59
Chapter 6
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
with Kajima Corporation.58 CUREE did a
tremendous number of things for funding the
young researchers in California during the
years when funding was difficult. In this case,
the funding came from Japan.
Borcherdt: Did CUREE help define the
framework for PEER?
58 Joe Penzien discusses starting the CUREE -Kajima Joint Research Program in Joseph Penzien, Connections, The EERI Oral History Series,
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute,
Oakland, CA, 2004, p. 75–77. George Housner
discusses the formation of CUREE in George W.
Housner, Connections, The EERI Oral History Series, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute,
Oakland, CA, 1997, p. 145–149.
60
Shah: All these efforts were related. One
thing led to another. Each effort supported
the other. None of us can say we stand on our
own. It does not work, because the available
resources for research were limited, the competition, and the number of people in the game
were increasing. Somehow the community of
researchers had to compromise somewhere.
What we did was to create a consortium which
made it possible for all of us to get stronger.
Chapter 7
International
Earthquake
Resiliency Efforts
The World Seismic Safety Initiative was established
to bring awareness throughout the world of what
is available to improve resiliency for earthquakes.
WSSI went to countries where there were a few
isolated people doing earthquake research, but they
had no voice.
Anagnos: An important international or global effort that you
were involved with was the International Decade for Natural
Hazard Reduction (IDNDR).
International Decade
for Natural Hazard Reduction
Shah: That was more of an international collaboration. Bill
Iwan and I, together with many of our colleagues, were involved.
IDNDR was the decade of the ’90s. The International Association
for Earthquake Engineering (IAEE) asked, what can we contribute
to IDNDR as a global earthquake organization. That’s when we
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Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
created the World Seismic Safety Initiative
(WSSI).
At the Tenth World Conference in Madrid in
1992, IAEE asked Housner, Iwan, and me as
a committee of three to produce a proposal
for how IAEE could contribute to IDNDR .
The three of us drafted a report to IAEE and
recommended that IAEE create a World
Seismic Safety Initiative to bring awareness
throughout the world of what is available to
improve resiliency for earthquakes. WSSI
became an international “go and do it” type of
organization, for IAEE .
Anagnos: I was reading a 1993 IAEE
publication called A Time for Action: The World
Seismic Safety Initiative, which is the justification and framework for WSSI. Roger, I see you
were involved.
Borcherdt: Yes, I was honored to be a member of the board. WSSI under Haresh’s leadership was very successful in bringing together
the leadership and limited resources in small
countries to take steps to help reduce the effects
of future earthquakes. For example, one of
the activities undertaken under the auspices
of WSSI was the SAFER Cities seismic-safety
initiative, which aimed to encourage public
awareness and the need to measure strong
earthquake shaking from future earthquakes.59
Significant numbers of reliable analog strong
motion accelerographs were provided by the
federal and state strong-motion programs at
59 R.D. Borcherdt, et al., 2002, SAFER Cities
(Strong-motion Accelerographs for Earthquake
Loss Reduction in Cities); A COSMOS — WSSI
Initiative for Seismic Safety, 7th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Boston, MA.
62
no cost for installation and maintenance in
the countries. These initial programs helped
spawn larger programs and more interest in
reducing the effects of earthquakes.
Shah: A lot of good people were on the WSSI
board such as Shel Cherry, Sudhir Jain, and
Tsuneo Katayama. Bill Iwan was very active.
Giuseppe Grandori was one of the founders.
Good group.
World Seismic Safety Initiative
Shah: Its funding initially came from RMS
so that they could set up a system. The first
WSSI meeting was in Bangkok, because
Bangkok is a hub for issues in Asia: India,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Japan. All these Asian
countries can easily travel to Bangkok. We had
a four-day meeting. We paid for everybody’s
stay there, and we talked about which issues
the Asians wanted to address first. Out of that
meeting came the concept that WSSI should
develop the High Level Meeting (HLM)
project.
The HLM meant if a country had an
earthquake engineering organization like
EERI, we would write to them, if not, then
we would write to the ministry. We would
indicate that we wanted to meet and tell
them about the resources available to make
their country more earthquake resilient. Our
plan was to invite that country’s engineering
groups, university community, media, and
political infrastructure. We wanted all of them
collectively to hear about our understanding of
earthquake risk in their country. We offered to
help them to contact all the resources that were
available globally, so that they could ask for
Haresh C. Shah • International Earthquake Resiliency Efforts
assistance. We made it clear that WSSI was not
going to solve all their earthquake risk-related
problems, but would be able to tell them how
to get the resources from the world, because we
were part of IAEE .
Good Response to WSSI
Shah: We got a good response everywhere,
from the highest level, like President Museveni
of Uganda. We would get invitations from the
prime minister or president of the country
saying, please come. Except in Myanmar. We
were invited by the Ambassador of Japan to
go, because Japan had a big project to help
Myanmar. We were naive politically. We went
there, and the Myanmar military government
got upset. Who gave the Japanese ambassador
permission to invite this foreign group without
local invitation? So they told us to leave the
country and we left. Soon after, they invited us
back, and we worked there for a decade.
Anagnos: Is there a specific outcome or
country where you felt particularly proud of
what WSSI was able to accomplish?
Shah: There are several. Amazingly, these
are the countries that had previously done the
least in terms of seismic resilience. Myanmar
is one of them. There is still an organization
in Myanmar that is highly active. They meet,
they have national conferences on earthquake
engineering. Uganda is another one. Until
we went there, East Africa had no earthquake
engineering group. We set it up in Uganda
[while he is telling this story, Haresh proudly
shows us the Uganda earthquake engineering
shirt he is wearing], and Uganda became the
center of earthquake engineering for all East
Africa. Now Kenya, Zambia, Rwanda, all
Chapter 7
meet in Uganda once a year for an earthquake
engineering conference.
Anagnos: Did they implement any new
codes or other measures in Uganda?
Shah: Yes. Uganda has a code that is mandatory for certain types of buildings, but for
general home construction it is recommended.
Again, those are political issues, and there is
not much we can do. Economics, politics, and
other things come into the picture. But those
two countries stand out. Other successes are, of
course, Algeria and Nepal.
Anagnos: Was your work in Algeria part of
the WSSI network?
Shah: Absolutely. I already had projects in
Algeria, so it was easy to bring in WSSI and
put them into the network. We went to many
countries. We even went to Sri Lanka, even
though they don’t have too many earthquakes.
They invited us. Indonesia was part of the
WSSI network. We went to places that nobody
else goes, because we felt that these were the
countries needing collaboration support.
High Level Meetings Had
Challenges
Borcherdt: As a board member of WSSI, I
thought it was amazing how successful you
were in arranging High Level Meetings with
influential officials in the various countries.
What were some of the challenges of these
meetings?
Shah: Five or six of us from WSSI were in
Bangladesh, and they had a coup. The High
Level Meeting was over, and the military
coup occurred while we were still there. Our
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Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
concern was how to get out of Bangladesh and
go to our next stop, which was Sri Lanka. Our
flight was from Dhaka to Bombay (at that time
it was called Bombay) and from Bombay to
Colombo.
Fortunately, Dhaka airport was operating. The
question was, how do we get from the downtown hotel to the airport? Rioters and military
were killing people on the streets. The mobs
would drag people out of the car and beat them
to death. We talked to the police, and we talked
to various government people. They suggested
we put on doctors’ clothes and they would give
us an ambulance and take us in the ambulance
with the siren to the airport. We went through
this mob, and they all just let us go through.
We would slow down for them to see what was
going on. They would look at us, and then the
driver would say, “Emergency.” We made it to
the airport and caught a flight to Bombay.
Anagnos: If you recall, we also had a coup at
the Seventh World Conference on Earthquake
Engineering in Istanbul in 1980.
Shah: In Istanbul, I had to escape to
Bulgaria. I couldn’t get any flight from Istanbul
airport, so I took a bus to a city named Burgas,
in Southern Bulgaria.
A Global Seismic Safety
Community
Anagnos: As a follow up, what do you think
was the most important contribution of WSSI?
Do you feel that it was successful in reducing
seismic risk globally?
Shah: The most important contribution
of the WSSI was developing support in
communities and countries that were not
64
in the “recognized” group of nations doing
earthquake research. The IAEE requires that a
country has a national earthquake engineering
organization, like EERI. Then through their
national organization, they can participate
in the World Conference. All the countries
that participate have their own earthquake
engineering membership group.
WSSI went to countries where there were a few
isolated people doing earthquake research,
but they had no voice. They did not have a
structure to come together, talk about their
problems, identify what needs to be done, go
to the global experts, invite global experts, go
to the world conferences and be part of the
community for dialog. For these countries, the
greatest contribution was not that we changed
their codes or anything, but we brought them
into a room or a community where they could
talk, listen, find out, and make decisions
about what to do. A few examples are Uganda,
Myanmar, and Algeria.
Anagnos: You are saying that WSSI created
the infrastructure and the community for them
to really effect change in their own country.
Shah: I would write a letter to an individual
I knew in the country. There was no organization in that country. I would send a copy to a
local newspaper and a copy to the government.
The letter would say that we are part of the
International Association for Earthquake
Engineering and are called the World Seismic
Safety Initiative. As part of the earthquake
engineering community, we want to come
for a high-level meeting, not to do technical
work, but to talk to all of you, and discuss how
the world can work with you to reduce your
earthquake risk.
Haresh C. Shah • International Earthquake Resiliency Efforts
Then when we talked to them, we would say,
“If after telling you that the world is available
to work with you and bring you into the
discussion groups, you don’t participate, we’ll
let the world know that you had a chance but
didn’t do it. When the next earthquake occurs,
we will write to your newspapers and remind
you that we told you so.” And everywhere, from
the president of the country, like Museveni in
Uganda, to ministers, they all showed up to the
first meeting. Because they were eager. They
knew that they needed to do something, but
they didn’t have the expertise, or the contacts,
or network to do this.
We were willing to give them a network that
they could exploit, and then throw us out.
That’s fine, our purpose was not to become the
bosses, but just to get them access to a network.
That was the greatest contribution that WSSI
made. We went where nobody else thought
about going. It has worked very well in those
countries. Every country where we went has
a national organization, and they are part of
IAEE .
Anagnos: So you think that WSSI has helped
reduce seismic risk globally.
Shah: Now they send students to Stanford
and MIT or wherever. Their professors and
professionals participate with people who
are in the know around the world. But most
importantly, they are talking and working,
and they have a voice. That was why WSSI was
established, and that is why after a while it was
dissolved.
Chapter 7
WSSI Dissolved
Anagnos: The World Seismic Safety Initiative was active from 1993 to 2009. What caused
it to end?
Shah: One of the reasons was funding. WSSI
funding came from private sources. For years
it was funded by RMS. Some years, I funded it.
Some years NTU Singapore funded it. In some
years IAEE provided support. But it was always
a struggle, so the foremost reason was funding.
The second reason was, as an international
organization, WSSI had people from all over
the world on the board, from Italy to Algeria to
Thailand. They all were very dedicated, but as
the years went by the senior people who were
board members started retiring. WSSI could
not have junior people coming in as the experts
to advise a country. Just because we came
from a developed country, it does not mean
everybody is an expert. We just didn’t feel we
could continue to offer advising and support at
a level that was needed to run WSSI.
Anagnos: Sometimes an organization
is about the people who are running that
organization.
Shah: Correct. Also, I was getting older, and
the energy level needed, besides all the other
things I was doing, WSSI was just too much.
When I said I was quitting, Professor T. C.
Pan from NTU, who was the secretary of the
organization, agreed with the board to wind
up the operations of WSSI. The WSSI was a
non-profit organization registered in Singapore
because it’s a neutral country, and no country
in the world felt that Singapore was controlled
by the U.S. or China or anybody else. So they
felt independent and good working with WSSI.
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Chapter 7
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Because of the time needed to keep it going,
particularly the travel, it was too much.
If I were ten years younger at that time, I would
have done it. But I was involved with numerous
other activities, so I said to IAEE that organizations such as WSSI should have a sunrise
and a sunset. And now it was time for WSSI to
66
wind up its activities. We gave them a reason.
We brought something like 12 or 13 countries
under the IAEE-fold. As you know, each
country has to apply to become a member of
IAEE . And we brought in many countries that
had never been part of IAEE . We said we did
what we could, and now it was time to close.
Chapter 8
Transforming
NTU Singapore
Su Guaning said, “Let’s change all these things,”
and from 2002 to 2005, I became his senior
academic advisor. This history is actually written in
a book: Troika! The Remarkable Ascent of a Great
Global University, Nanyang Technological University
Singapore, 2003–2017
Sabbatical at Nanyang
Technological University Singapore (NTU)
Anagnos: How did you get involved with NTU in the first place?
Shah: In 1992, I was chair of the department at Stanford, and I
was tired of the work. I wanted to take a sabbatical so that I could
catch up with earthquake research. One of the areas I wanted to
study was the subduction zone just west of Sumatra. The area is
very seismic, and as you know, in 2004 a magnitude 9 earthquake
occurred and sent a tsunami all over Asia, and even to Africa.
I was interested in what Indonesians were doing about seismic
risk, what kind of codes and building standards they have. I didn’t
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Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
want to take sabbatical in Indonesia. It’s a
tough place to be. So, I contacted Professor
T.C. Pan at NTU. He used to work for John A.
Blume Associates, and joined NTU in ’85 as
an associate professor.60 I wrote to him to ask
if he would host me for three months. To my
shock, I was told, NTU doesn’t do that. I sent
my resume and told them I am a chairman of
the department at Stanford University and so
on. They were very reluctant. Nevertheless,
after some internal discussions, they said they
would host me and give me an office.
When I went there, I discovered that even
to make a one-page photocopy, I had get a
note from my host, which was T.C., to get
permission. At that time, RMS was growing
and a company wanted to invest. I got a call
from the investor at about midnight. A security
guard came and said, there’s a call for you from
America, you have to come to his office. I asked
why I have to go to the security guard’s office
to take a call from America. He said you don’t
have international calling or receiving in your
room. I felt like I was at a prehistoric university.
Three months went by, and I kept thinking that
this is not a place where you can thrive.
When I returned to Stanford, I was asked to be
on the advisory board of the Stanford Center
60 Tso-Chien Pan earned his MSCE (1978) and
PhD (1983) from UC Berkeley, and BSCE (1975)
from National Cheng-​Kung University, Taiwan. He held senior engineering positions with
Bechtel and URS/John A Blume & Associates in
San Francisco, where he worked on analysis and
design of nuclear power facilities against earthquake loading and other dynamic loadings. He
served as chair of CEE (2005), and Dean of the
College of Engineering (2006–2011) at NTU.
68
for International Studies. Lee Kuan Yew, who
was the founding Prime Minister of Singapore,
was also on the board. Lee Kuan Yew, being
an important and busy person, did not attend
all the meetings. When he did not attend, he
would send his ambassador, Dr. S.R. Nathan,
to attend for him. Nathan is Singaporean for
many generations, but of Indian origin. I am an
Indian in America. So we hit it off. Then, to my
surprise, I got a note in 1999 that said that the
new president of Singapore is Nathan.61
Request to Help Change NTU
Shah: After a few years, he called me and
said, “Haresh, our education system here
needs some changes. I have seen how Stanford
works. Can you come here and help us out?”
At about the same time, the president of NTU
was retiring, and they were going to install a
new president. Amazingly, the new president,
who was the head of the Advanced Research
Projects Agency of Singapore, happened to be a
Stanford PhD. His name was Su Guaning.62
President Nathan must have told him that
when you go to Stanford, look up Professor
Shah, talk to him and see if he is willing to
come here. I had a lunch with him, and we
hit it off quite well. He agreed that the way
NTU was, and the way education was, and the
way that professors did work was no good for
Singapore, no good for students, no good for
61 Sellapan Ramanathan Nathan (1924–2016)
served as the sixth president of Singapore between 1999 and 2011.
62 Su Guaning served as the president of Nanyang
Technological University (NTU) between 2003
and 2011.
Haresh C. Shah • Transforming NTU Singapore
anybody. They needed to change. The crux was
it was all based on the British system, which is
top-down. I said, at Stanford, we are bottomup, and your country may not like it. S.R. said,
“I’m the president of the country and I want it
that way. I want NTU to be like Stanford. If Su
Guaning agrees and you hit it off, you come.”
Senior Academic Advisor
to NTU President
Shah: In 2002 I decided to go and do some
research of my own: who are the people, what
they are doing, what’s going on, why do they
need approval to make a photocopy, why don’t
they have telephones, why don’t they have
simple things that every university has? Su
Guaning said, “Let’s change all these things,”
and from 2003 to 2005, I became his senior
academic advisor. This history is actually
written in this book.63
Anagnos: What a remarkable story. Connections you made at Stanford led to a long-term
international relationship. What were some of
the main outcomes of your experience at NTU?
Shah: In 2005, the Singapore Ministry of
Education made all universities autonomous,
in the sense that they were not run by the
Ministry of Education. Instead, each university
was run by a board of trustees. I became one of
the board members of NTU.
I spent 17 years at NTU bringing it up, and
now NTU has a fantastic environment. They
63 B. Andersson, H.C. Shah, G. Su, & T. Mayer,
2022, Troika! The Remarkable Ascent of a Great
Global University, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, 2003–2017, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore.
Chapter 8
have as many companies from around the
world working with the students and doing
research as we have at Stanford. Employees of
those companies, together with students are
working on new innovations. That is a better
way of bringing innovation to students, letting
students be entrepreneurial, and joining these
companies to do great things.
Raised NTU Ranking
to the Top Three in Asia
Shah: Su and I recruited faculty from all over
the world. We hired an unbelievable quality
of people. Suddenly the university started
publishing more, started taking students with
goals similar to those of NTU, and it became a
cycle. When we started, they were not ranked
in the top 500. When we left in 2017, they were
in the top three in Asia. In the world they
were either in the top ten, top 15 or top 50,
depending on which measure. Why? Because
the faculty and their students were a new breed
who understood what a university is. It is
innovation, education, transfer of knowledge
and supporting students in terms of their ability to change the world. The philosophy is that
professors don’t change the world, professors
through their students change the world.
Anagnos: Based on your experiences at
Stanford, did you try to create an atmosphere
as Stanford-like as you could, with a very open
and bottom-up approach?
Shah: The whole academic governance
system is exactly like Stanford. It turned out
that every leader in the country was amenable
to it. They were very much looking forward to
it. I could not have done it unless they wanted
to do it. They were eager on their own and
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pushed by the top leadership of the country. So,
there was not much choice.
Anagnos: The Institute of Catastrophe Risk
Management (ICRM) at NTU was launched in
2010. What is the focus of that institute?
Shah: When I went to NTU, I found that in
Asia, besides Japan, there is no major university
center for catastrophe risk research. I felt that
we needed to do something in Singapore to
help countries like India, Southeast Asia,
Africa to be part of this community who can
access the most modern research in the area
of catastrophe risk. When I became senior
advisor and a board member at NTU, one of
the first things I did was to recruit Kerry Sieh,
who was a top geoscience researcher from
Caltech.
When I approached him he said, “Haresh, are
you kidding? Why would I go to Singapore? I’m
at Caltech.” I said that’s exactly why you should
go to Singapore. Create another Caltech, for
Asia. We took a while talking, and I convinced
him that maybe he should try it out for a few
years. Then I gave him an offer that he could
not refuse, and he accepted it.
We asked the government to float a request
for proposal in the area of innovation for
Singapore. I asked Kerry to write a proposal,
and he won it. Eventually it ended up being
$50 million (SGD), a ton of money. So he
established the Earth Observatory of Singapore
(EOS).
Then I talked to T.C. Pan and said you need
on the engineering side something similar to
the Blume Center, but he was worried about
not having the right people. I said, “As a leader,
what do you want to establish? We’ll get the
70
people. Don’t worry, whether they will come
or not. That’s our job.” So I went to my friend,
S.R. Nathan, president of the country, and I
told him I want you to back me in establishing
an Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management.
He had lots of political questions, lots of
financial questions and lots of questions about
justification: why in Singapore if we don’t have
earthquakes. But I convinced him. So he called
Koh Boon Hwee, the Chairman of the Board
of Trustees and said, “I want you to establish,
with the help of Haresh Shah, this institute.”
He didn’t give it a name. Boon Hwee and I
talked to NTU President Su Guaning, and of
course, he agreed because the president of the
country said do it. The center funding came
through the university, but that came from the
Singapore President’s budget.
In the end, we started two big centers. One
was Kerry Sieh’s EOS, which focused on
geohazards research throughout Southeast
Asia, and T.C. Pan’s Institute of Catastrophe
Risk Management (ICRM), which focused
on interdisciplinary research on catastrophetriggered risk. The center was established in
one year. We started getting projects, internal
projects through internal funding. Then we
got projects from the government of Singapore.
All the countries of Southeast Asia, the government of Singapore said “We will provide you all
that you need in terms of vulnerability, collection of exposure data, collection of anything
that you need.” All that came to ICRM. I was
the Chairman of the Board of ICRM until I
retired in 2017.
Anagnos: How did developing these
institutes fit into the strategic plan for the
transformation of NTU?
Haresh C. Shah • Transforming NTU Singapore
Shah: What is a university? It’s a relationship
among students, their professors, and the
contributions they make to the literature and
knowledge to the world. Our idea was to build
centers, bring some leading academics (we
called them elephants), give enough money to
these elephants to hire gazelles (the brightest
young researchers), and let that team start
generating and disseminating knowledge.64
They would become a magnet for people to
come, attend conferences, share knowledge.
Asia previously did not have that kind of thing.
NTU started creating it, not just in our field,
but in artificial intelligence, chips, materials
… they are one of the very best in the world in
materials.
Anagnos: This is just such an amazing story,
because it shows how you’ve used your creativity and innovation in so many ways. [Haresh
shows us a graph of the change in NTU’s
rankings over time from his book. NTU rises
dramatically compared to other schools.]
Shah: This is very interesting. Can you see?
This is where NTU was when we started, at
the bottom. This is where it is now. [He giggles
with pride.] This includes Stanford, Harvard,
Cambridge, Oxford, everybody in terms of a
certain scale. So, it can be done. But you need
the right people.
64 The elephants and gazelles strategy is discussed
on pages 181–188 of Troika! The Remarkable Ascent of a Great Global University, Nanyang Technical University Singapore, 2003–2017.
Chapter 8
Recognizing Contributions
to NTU’s Transformation
Anagnos: In 2015 NTU awarded you an honorary doctorate to recognize these significant
contributions to their academic development.
When you went there to receive the award,
it must have been something to stand up on
that stage and see all those students who had
benefited from NTU’s transformation.
Shah: It was interesting. I was Chairman of
the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board
of Trustees. My committee selected the honorary doctorates. Every year they would bring up
my name, and I would say “No, that’s a conflict
of interest, I am a chairman.” In 2015 I retired
from the Board of Trustees, which means I was
also off the Academic Affairs Committee. They
must have nominated me for the honorary
doctorate as soon as I retired.
It so happened I was also a special advisor and
on a similar academic advisory committee for a
large private university in India, called Symbiosis International University. The President
of India, Pranab Mukherjee, was going to be
the chief guest for their convocation, so they
wanted somebody like me to receive an honorary degree. They must have gotten together
and quickly approved my name. Symbiosis
awarded me an honorary doctorate in India in
November, 2014. So NTU was not the first.
I knew the inside discussion of how this is
done, so I could imagine what they must have
talked about, because I used to lead those
discussions. I’m not sure if I was very elated or
proud. I just knew what was going on, the inner
working of how doctorates are given.
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Anagnos: That’s actually a funny story,
but I do think it shows how appreciative they
were for what you did. By reading the forward
of your book I can see that there’s so much
admiration and gratitude for the work you and
your colleagues did to transform NTU.
Shah: I want to show you the medal that I
received in 2014, which I am particularly proud
of. It is called Pingat Bakti Masyarakat [the
title is in Malay and translates to Public Service
Medal]. This medal is the highest honor given
by the Government of Singapore to somebody
72
who has given all he or she can to make the
society better. Whenever I go to Singapore, I
have to wear it like this [he shows us that he
must wear it on the left side of his jacket].
Anagnos: Are you involved at all anymore?
Shah: No involvement now. You see my
philosophy is when you are done, you are done.
Don’t interfere because the new people have
their own ideas. They want to do their thing.
And you need to let them. We meet each other
as friends, but nothing else.
Chapter 9
Giving Back
We learned as a family, make sure that if somebody
needs help, you provide what you can. Just be happy
that you were lucky enough to be able to help.
Motivation
Anagnos: You have developed, or helped develop, numerous
organizations, foundations, and awards that have supported a wide
range of people and causes. Some of them support advancement of
earthquake engineering and reduction of seismic risk, but others
support individual people in living day to day and in achieving
their goals. What has motivated you to be so generous? How did
your upbringing shape your worldview and your academic as well
as personal goals?
Shah: I grew up in a middle-class business family. We lived in a
community of middle-class business people who were reasonably
well-off, so there was not much misery immediately around us.
My parents and the community in which I grew up were very
conservative in the sense of how they viewed the world and in
terms of religion. They hammered certain concepts into us: don’t
be arrogant, show empathy, make sure that anybody’s pain is your
pain, don’t cause pain for others, and if you give anybody pleasure
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or you are successful, don’t take credit for it.
These kinds of things.
Although money was not a problem to people
in our community, we could see extreme
poverty in many parts of town, and through
the people who worked for us, such as those
who cleaned the house, and people who
worked in my father’s business.
I always sympathized with them, and wanted
to know what we can do besides just helping
with money. How can I help them so that
they can get out of that cycle? I realized that
education is the key, right from the beginning.
People who were having trouble had dropped
out of school, not because they wanted to. They
were capable, but they had to focus on earning
a daily wage. They needed money to buy food
and eat. A key path out of that is to stay in
school. No matter how difficult it is, just stay
in school, keep going as long as you can. And
when it becomes very difficult, ask somebody
for help, but don’t get out.
My father was a very big supporter of high
schools and elementary schools. He was on the
board of trustees of the school. His position
was secretary of the board of trustees. So,
everything went through him. As a result, I
knew how difficult it was for many families
to educate their children. Fortunately, in the
community I lived in, there were many support
structures. They had free lunch every day.
Anyone who came, no questions asked, they
would get lunch.
When you see all of this, you realize that
everybody needs help. Once in a while, no
matter who you are, where you are, you need
help, and there is nothing wrong with it. If you
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really need help, take it. We learned as a family,
make sure that if somebody needs help, you
provide what you can. Just be happy that you
were lucky enough to be able to help.
The Emelie Foundation
Anagnos: Were these the principles that led
you and your family to establish the Emelie
Foundation? 65
Shah: Yes. The problem is, families want
their boys to go to school and have a job, but for
the girls, they say no they are needed at home.
Initially, there was a huge amount of social
objection to women taking a job in an office or
a factory. The society was looking for an excuse
to do what they were used to, and every time
we proved them wrong. Now it is happening.
But these are social issues that are difficult to
overcome. If you wait for the government, or
you wait for somebody else to do it, it will not
happen. So you just do it. Who is going to say
no to you? It is your money, your time, your
effort, and your ideas.
One of the first things we say at the Emelie
Foundation is that if every young woman is
educated for a few more years, the impact is
enormous. The impact is much larger than
focusing on educating a limited number of
additional women. In India, it was very visible
because poor girls were pulled out very quickly.
It’s a complex issue. For example, in poor
65 The Emelie Foundation was established in 2016
in memory of Chandulal M. Shah, Raman Gauri
C. Shah, and Induben C. Shah. The mission is
to increase educational opportunities for single
mothers and their daughters.
https://www.theemeliefoundation.org/
Haresh C. Shah • Giving Back
families, the girls do not have sanitary napkins.
When they get their period, they don’t want to
go to school. After a while, they are behind and
they feel so ashamed that they just don’t go to
school. They tell their mother I’m not going
anymore. They will pull out on their own,
because they get behind and then they can’t
keep up. It’s just terrible.
We set up the Emelie Foundation in 2016 to
provide financial support for single mothers
and their daughters. We wanted to do things
in a focused way so that we can have more
impact. We started with vocational training
for mothers: tailoring and data entry. Then
slowly the mothers put us in touch with their
daughters. They would say “My daughter wants
to go to school, but we don’t have money.” So,
we took the daughters. We support girls from
the poorest of the poor families until they
reach their capacity. Some of them go through
school, then to college, and some of them are
postgraduates. Some of them are in middle
class working families. We have changed many,
many families. There are many girls all over
India now who are supported, and we support
them fully. All their tuition is paid; all their
expenses are paid. One requirement is they
must be or have single mothers, that is, the
husband has died or run away. In poor societies
it is common that men abandon their wives
either to take a mistress, or they just do not
want the responsibility nor have the financial
capacity to support a family. So their children
are condemned to a poverty cycle forever. We
are pulling them out. It is working.
We started slowly, and now there are some
women in college and some are doing master’s
degrees in things like business, pharmacy and
Chapter 9
accounting. They are not going to be poor.
They are going to get fantastic jobs and enter,
what I call, a middle class. And that is what
Emelie Foundation is all about.
Anagnos: The Emelie Foundation supports
the education of only women, but you also
personally support education for all kinds of
students.
Family Foundation
for Educational Support
Shah: Requests continuously come up, and
the Emelie Foundation is not capable of taking
care of so many requests.
Just last week, I got a request from a tribal
school near Bombay. Imagine, the financial
capital of India, and about 30 miles from
Bombay there’s a school that has something
like 500 or 600 tribal children, and none of
them have a desk or a chair to sit on. They all
sit on the classroom floor. And when it is rainy
and wet or cold, it’s very difficult. They asked if
I would I help them build chairs and desks for
all of them. I said, “I can’t do it for 600 at once,
but you develop a plan, and we’ll do 100 at a
time.”
Anagnos: Are your children involved, or is it
just you and your wife, Joan?
Shah: My two boys are involved. Joan is
involved, of course. There are quite a few
well-off people in India who are running their
own companies, who are donating their time as
the board of trustees and actually running the
foundation.
It is funded 100% by my family. I didn’t want
to spend money in fundraising, because
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fundraising takes tremendous resources. Many
nonprofit corporations spend anywhere from
15% to 35% in fundraising. I didn’t want that.
Instead, I decided, no bricks and mortar at all.
No spending money on that. The only thing we
do is, for every dollar, we take 15 cents and put
it back into the endowment for future inflation.
The foundation is doing well, it’s small still.
We still talk in terms of hundreds of people
supported, but in a few years it will reach
thousands, and then it will have some measurable impact in communities.
Anagnos: What is it like working with these
philanthropic organizations in India?
Shah: You know, it is very interesting that
once you have a foundation like this, and
everyone knows that you are supporting single
mothers and their daughters, other foundations who are also in similar philanthropic
areas join you. They say, look, if you need
somebody for birth control, send them to
us and we’ll take care of them. Then we tell
them, if you have people who need support for
college, please send them to us. Now there is
a network of these foundations who help each
other reach candidates and support people who
are in need. By joining a network of foundations, each one specializing in a particular kind
of support, we help each other, so that lots and
lots of people are supported.
Being a relatively wealthy city, Pune has many
foundations. I would say there are hundreds of
foundations in Pune that do different things,
and they all join with each other, help each
other, and the impact is increased because of
this network.
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Computers for Rural Schools
Anagnos: You were involved with an
impressive project that provided computers
and then created a school in a rural area in the
Himalayas. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Shah: I come from Gujarat, a western state
in India. One thing Indians are very sensitive
about amongst themselves is they think I will
support only people from Gujarat or Maharashtra. To me, poverty has no religion, class,
creed, color or anything. When somebody
needs support, they could be from anywhere.
To make sure that I was egalitarian, I spent
a lot of effort during the 1980s in supporting
tribal people, hill people, in the north of India.
They are totally different than I am. They look
different, they speak a language that I don’t
understand. I saw that they had a lot of problems. Young people would leave their parents,
when they were maybe 14 or 15, go to the valley,
take a menial job, and remain in poverty all
their lives. This has two negatives. One, they
remain in poverty, and two, the poor parents
are old and the communities in the mountains
slowly die out. That is, there is no recycling
of human capital. I wanted to help keep the
children in the north, where they were born,
and develop that area enough so that they have
job opportunities and an opportunity to learn.
One of the first things I did was to start a computer school in the far away mountains where
there was no internet, so I connected through
satellite. Roads were almost nonexistent, but
there were children. The RMS office in New
Delhi donated about 50 computers to their
school. There was such an incredible mad rush
for young people to join the school that it was
Haresh C. Shah • Giving Back
Chapter 9
more difficult to get a position in that school
than to go to Stanford, because there were
many, many children, and we could only take
50. I didn’t want one computer being shared
by ten people. I wanted every child to have one
computer, so we could take only 50.
children are leaving the area. The community
still remains in danger because there are better
jobs in Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune, and
places like that. But most important, the girls
who are not allowed to live too far away from
the parents are getting good jobs locally.
Jobs in the Local Community
Response to Perception of Bias
Amazingly, in one year they all got jobs,
locally! In the town council and local bank
office, to enter data, and they knew how to deal
with the internet. Then some local people,
retired judges and retired teachers, asked if we
could start a dedicated school. You could see
how hungry the people were. So, we started a
school with four grades, in the mountains in
little huts.
Anagnos: You faced some criticism and
challenges with perceptions that the Emelie
Foundation needed to broaden the population
it serves.
Then some highly respected people raised a lot
of money, and we built a school in the village of
Milethi, literally the middle of nowhere. To get
there, children had to come down the mountains, or go up a mountain and come down
into this village. But nevertheless, we built it.
Initially, the children would come by walking.
That was impractical, so the government
helped us build some dirt roads, and we bought
a bus and started bringing children on busses.
Today, 15 years later, there are 1200 students
from kindergarten through pre-college. All
these young people are getting educated.
Some of them are going now to the colleges in
big cities and some of them are working locally.
But most important, the government of the
state called Himachal Pradesh started putting
offices there, because they knew that these
children need jobs, and the government needs
work done. Now there is active intellectual
exchange and work going on. Hopefully fewer
Shah: Yes, we were accused of only supporting Hindus. In response, we started reaching
out to schools that cater mainly to Christian
families, like church schools, and communities
that mainly cater to the Muslim community
through their mosque. We talked to the principals and said, “We are sure you have students
who need financial help. Could you please
send some names and ask them to apply?”
They were very, very nice and they sought out
support from the foundation, and now we are
supporting their mothers and daughters.
Recently, I came across a community in
Kashmir. You know, Pakistan and India have
been in a territorial war over Kashmir for
a long time. I wanted to make sure that we
support children from that area who may be
anti-India but living in India. That is, they
want to be with Pakistan, but due to partition
they are in India. We started supporting them.
Suddenly people were mad and asked why we
were supporting Muslims. I told them, “Look,
when I didn’t support them, you blame me for
supporting mostly Hindus. Now you are asking
me why I support them.”
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But you can’t listen to that. As I said, poverty
and need have no color, no religion or anything. So we try to do what we can. You know,
the world is very complex, extremely complex,
and you just have to take the criticism and
move on. What can you do?
EERI Shah Family
Innovation Prize
Anagnos: Your family has supported a
number of prizes and awards to support
education and innovation in the engineering
community. In particular, you funded the
EERI Shah Family Innovation Prize. Why an
innovation prize?
Shah: You know we civil engineers are very
traditional. I graduated in ’59, and we did the
usual things civil engineers had done forever.
Let me take a few minutes and tell you the story
of the locomotive engineers. It’s important for
us to learn. When locomotives were invented
and the train system came into being, the
locomotive engineers were the cream of the
crop. They were running the iron horse, and
nobody could be as powerful as they were. As
time passed, it became a job. As time further
passed, automobiles came. And as time further
passed, electric trains came, and so on. The
locomotive engineers refused to accept the fact
that their importance was changing. Unless
they kept up with the world as it was moving
along and learned new things, they would be
obsolete. They did become obsolete, and they
had no jobs. Yet, only 100 years ago they were
considered as the elite of the elite.
That story reminds us that as the world
changes, civil engineers need to adapt to new
challenges. The environment is one of those
78
challenges. We civil engineers should be
responsible for the quality of air we breathe,
the quality of food we eat, the quality of water
we drink. Do we as civil engineers understand
community? Building a city is not just building
a building, but building a community, an area
where people live. How do you make these
communities thrive? Civil engineers were
not doing enough of these things. They were
becoming, in my view, sort of the locomotive
engineers of the previous generation. I wanted
to create new opportunities for civil engineers.
You know, my whole thrust in the insurance
sector and on risk management was very
planned. I wanted to make sure that we went
into something that no one else had done. The
only risk analysis that was done 50 years ago
was in business schools and related to funding
money. There was no risk management for
the environment, for summer fires, for earthquakes, for hurricanes. I saw a small opening.
I felt we needed to create a new opportunity
for our students who can create change. We as
professors cannot change the world. We are
just a catalyst for our students who are going
to change the world. We have to give them an
intellectual chemical thrust, so that they can
go into it and literally change the boundaries of
the profession and create new ideas.
Anagnos: So, the goal of the EERI Shah
Family Innovation Prize was to acknowledge
young professionals who were innovating.
Shah: Yes, pushing the boundaries. As
professors, we don’t have enough bandwidth
for the tremendous opportunities that are
in the world. But our students together have
that. If you have ten students, the bandwidth
is 20 times more than one of us. That was
Haresh C. Shah • Giving Back
my philosophy, and it still is. We are only
providing incentives, and the students make
themselves leaders.
Stanford Shah Family Fund
and NTU Shah Family Prize
Anagnos: There are two other incentive
programs you have funded, the Stanford Shah
Family Fund and the NTU Shah Family Prize.
Are these similar prizes?
Shah: They have identical goals with a
slightly different philosophy of setting them
up. Singapore is a unique country where 80%
of the good jobs are well-paid government
jobs. So, the incentive for young people to
take another job, take a risk and start another
Singapore Google or Singapore Meta was not
there. In 2000, I started consulting with the
Singapore government on higher education
issues. The Straits Times interviewed me and
asked what I thought about Singapore as an
entrepreneurial hub. They published a few
articles about our interview.
Then I decided to see if there was a spark
in Singapore, in the university and in the
community of students by starting an NTU
entrepreneurship prize. I purposely made it
one for a male and one for a female. I asked the
professors to select a male and a female who
were the most innovative students graduating.
They selected three males and three females
because each category had prize number one,
two and three. I was very happy. They asked
me to go and award the prize at the graduation,
which I did.
After the ceremony I asked how they selected
the awardees. They told me it was very simple.
Chapter 9
They selected the top three male students, and
the top three female students. I was surprised
and asked how they knew they were the most
innovative. They said, don’t you think they
are the smartest? I said, yes, on one scale they
are smart. On another scale, they could be the
least intelligent. I went to the president of the
university and said please tell them entrepreneurship and innovation are not identical and
congruent with grades. The next year, the same
thing happened. They only awarded the top
three students, and I got very upset.
I said, I will give you three more years. If you
don’t change the way you select, I’m going to
pull the award. The professors tried hard, but
they did not understand entrepreneurship,
because they grew up in an environment of
government-supported grants. Anything they
wanted, the government gave. You didn’t have
to write a huge, fantastic proposal and compete
with ten other proposals to get funding.
They never realized that you have to be a real
innovator and entrepreneur to get research
money.
Anyway, after three years I did pull the award. I
started providing support for students through
other means. Now there is a relatively better
and more thriving environment for venture
capital firms in Singapore. For most of Asia,
the VCs are in Singapore. They are demanding
much more robust evaluation to determine
who are entrepreneurs and who are not.
Anagnos: I understand that now the name
is the Shah Family Prize for Innovative Undergraduate Student Projects, and the students
have to submit their project to a committee.
Then there’s some kind of a review of their
projects.
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Shah: Yes, but it’s still not working well.
There is still probably some money, so they use
it, but it is working much better to work with
external non-university stakeholders.
Helping Farmers:
Asia Risk Transfer Solutions
Anagnos: I saw something on your resume
about Asia Risk Transfer Solutions Inc. What
is that?
Shah: After RMS was very successful, I went
back to one of my old passions, how to help poor
farmers. Many countries in Asia do not depend
on irrigation as much as we do in the Western
world. They depend on rain. When the rain
comes, they are fine. If the rain doesn’t come,
they are wiped out. They cannot pay off the loan
that they have taken for seeds. They commit
suicide. We wanted to do something to help.
It turns out that in many Asian countries, the
government provides subsidies to farmers for
crop failure. But in some countries like India,
for example, farmers are on their own. The
government started a crop insurance scheme,
but they did not know how to run it. They did
not have well-organized data of when, how
often, at what level, which crops fail, how much
it cost, and how much subsidy they would have
to provide.
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I saw that as an opportunity, based on what
we had learned from RMS. As a subsidiary
of RMS, I started a group within RMS called
Crop Insurance Scheme. It turns out that
most of the schemes that we were looking at
were in Asia. The project started taking too
many resources from RMS, so the owners
of RMS at that time recommended that we
separate it. We started a separate stand-alone
company called Asia Risk Transfer Solutions,
and I was the Chairman. It did well. Later
on, when I left RMS, I removed myself from
everything related to RMS, including the Asia
Risk Transfer Solutions chairmanship. Then,
it didn’t do well, and the investors decided to
wind it up.
I decided that it was still needed. So, I
personally started a company called Asia Risk
Transfer Solutions (ARTS), which to this day
exists. It was doing fine and was profitable, but
I recently shut it down because this requires a
lot of travel, and I can’t really do it anymore.
Chapter 10
Family
As they say, the greatest pleasure is in giving, not
receiving. And it’s true, at least for me, it’s true. I do
what I enjoy and I enjoy it, this kind of thing.
Joan
Anagnos: Tell us about Joan’s family and background.
Shah: Joan is from a Dutch Indonesian family. The Dutch
occupied Indonesia for several hundred years as a colonial power,
and many Dutch government people were sent from Holland to
manage infrastructure and services. Joan’s mother comes from a
pure European family: Austrian, Dutch and Swiss mix.
Her father, Willem Dersjant, comes from a mixed Indonesian
Dutch family. He was a lawyer for the Dutch government working
in Indonesia. His job was to oversee tax collection in the huge
archipelago, which consists of thousands of islands. So he had to
go to all the small islands to make sure that their tax collection was
done properly.
Wilhelmina and Willem had three children. Joan is the eldest, and
Helen is second. They were both born in Indonesia. Roland Willem
is the youngest, and was born here. Joan was born during the World
War II when the Japanese occupied Indonesia. Most of the Dutch
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families were considered enemies of the Japanese, and they were put in internment camps.
Joan was born in 1942 in one of those camps, in
a town called Bukit Tinggi on Sumatra.
Food was not available. Joan’s grandmother
(Wilhelmina’s mother) was a wealthy lady, and
she would somehow smuggle food into the
internment camp to feed the children. So Joan
was raised under very difficult circumstances
the first few years, until they were liberated
after the Japanese were defeated in ’45.
Indonesia achieved full independence from
Holland in December 1949. Things became
difficult in the 1950s, and it was obvious that
they had to leave. So in 1955, Joan’s father
took the family and immigrated to Holland.
Holland is a tiny country, making it a challenge
to absorb hundreds of thousands of people
from Indonesia. America and other countries
also offered to take these immigrants. In 1958
Joan’s father, mother, and the two daughters
came to America from Holland through a
church group. They stayed on the East Coast
with some relatives, and then moved to the
Sacramento area, also with a church group.
Joan’s father was educated in Holland, but that
legal education was no good here. He had to
find a job. So they struggled initially but they
finally established themselves in Daly City and
then moved to a community near San Rafael in
Marin County.
Anagnos: You and Joan both dealt with
moving from your home to an unfamiliar and
faraway place.
Shah: For me it was easy, because I came to
Stanford from a well off family and was always
82
taken care of. For her and her family it was
tough.
Anagnos: How was Joan involved in all of
your philanthropic work?
Shah: Joan is very interested in education.
She worked for the Palo Alto Unified School
District for 15 years, first for the principal at
Gunn High School and then for the school
district Deputy Superintendent. She was very
much the driver for our work with schools in
the mountain region of North India. She was
the main spokesperson for helping the needy
with tools and education. Whether it was the
Family Foundation, an EERI grant, a Stanford
gift, or women’s education in India, Joan was
very enthusiastic with our plans and contributed many ideas to implement those plans.
Without her and my two sons’ enthusiastic
participation at every step, we could not have
implemented our combined wishes.
Anagnos: Joan has been your partner almost
60 years. And she’s traveled with you all around
the U.S. and the world attending professional
meetings, entertaining students and visitors,
participating in philanthropic endeavors. She’s
always there participating, providing support,
welcoming people, and making everyone feel
comfortable.
Shah: We learned a lot together. Meeting
people, rich, poor, powerful, and not so powerful. Basically, everybody’s the same.
Hemant
Anagnos: You have two sons and nine
grandchildren. Tell us a little bit about your
older son Hemant.
Haresh C. Shah • Family
Shah: I must say, Hemant is an unbelievably
smart kid. Really! When he was four or five
years old he would pick up my books and read
them. He’d say, “Pop, I’m reading.” He still
loves to read. He went to Stanford where he
earned a civil engineering bachelors and an
engineering management masters.
Anagnos: What was it like having your son
in the same department?
Shah: It was tough, but Jim Gere was of great
help. When Hemant would take some of the
fundamental classes that I used to teach like
statics, I was very uncomfortable about that. I
would ask Jim to do me a favor. Jim personally
graded Hemant’s homework, exams, everything. We had a very good working relationship, Jim, Hemant and me; we worked it out.
Anagnos: How did Hemant become your
partner at RMS?
Shah: When he was doing his engineering
management master’s degree in ’89, one of
the projects was to develop a business model.
Hemant came to me and said, “Pop, can we
make a business model for your work on risk
management?” He started out and he was
fascinated. He realized that there was a lot
more to it than what I knew. I knew mostly the
civil side, but we needed to learn a lot about
the finance and business side. He developed
the whole model, including what we needed to
learn, and what was missing.
He earned an A on the project, and then told
me, “Pop, I want to use this plan to start a risk
management business. I think I can make
it happen, but I need money.” I said, “I’m a
professor. I don’t have a ton of money.” But I
Chapter 10
gave him some money, and he started out. You
see what happened then.
Anagnos: How does the business plan that
Hemant created connect with the Stanford
Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) we
talked about earlier?
Shah: He knew them before I did. He started
talking to OTL while he was doing his project.
He’s very resourceful. He would go and talk to
them, ask all kinds of questions.
Anagnos: So Hemant was working with
Stanford OTL before you officially established
a relationship with that office.
Shah: Absolutely, because for his project he
needed to learn how to start a company. He
approached them on his own as part of his
class project. Since the technology was owned
by me, Stanford OTL came to me and said
we would like to work with your son to start
a business. Would you give permission? The
university will invest in it.
Anagnos: What was it like for you to be
working with your son so intensely on developing a company. Was it hard to work with a
family member?
Shah: No, I considered him like another
smart student. I never thought of him as my
son in terms of RMS. Whenever I wanted
to see him, I would make an appointment. I
didn’t consider that just because he’s my son
I can walk in his office. He was a big shot, he
had other things to do. I had to treat him with
respect. I cannot speak for him, but I was never
uncomfortable. I trusted him very much.
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Anagnos: He co-founded another company
now called Archipelago Analytics. What is that
company?
Shah: After he was done with RMS, he took
a year off. He was tired after 29 years as RMS
CEO. For a year he did nothing, but that’s not
Hemant. He would talk to his friends in the
industry. He was elected to the Aspen Institute
as one of the movers and shakers. He got the
2014 Most Admired CEO, Bay Area award from
San Francisco Business Times. He received
many awards.
Anyway, he wanted to figure out how he could
use his knowledge to start a small company,
with five to ten people and have fun. He
thought he could work with a new class of
models for insuring portfolios. That idea was
extremely attractive to reinsurance companies,
because they designed their portfolios so that
the properties they insure are geographically
widely distributed. Hemant started developing mathematical models of how to insure
portfolios.
For example, a large corporation like Marriott
has maybe 10,000 properties around the
world, maybe more. Historically, they would
insure each property in each market and
pay individual premiums. The reason being
that there was no insurance or reinsurance
company capable of taking the whole set of
properties because they were not big enough to
handle such a large exposure. However, with
the advent of the new world after RMS, there
are companies which are so huge that they can.
The impact of RMS on the industry has been
tremendous. The insurance and reinsurance
industry have become huge.
84
When Hemant saw this, he said this is the
time to develop portfolio risk. Archipelago
is developing systems for big owners of
properties. Hemant’s idea of keeping his new
company small didn’t succeed. He is growing
big like RMS.
Mihir
Anagnos: Mihir is three years younger than
Hemant. What is he like?
Shah: Mihir is extremely outgoing. He is
very lovable person. After high school, he first
enrolled in University of California, San Diego
and then transferred to Stanford, where he
graduated with a degree in economics.
We used to own a restaurant called Gaylord.
When Mihir graduated, I asked him to run
that business because, we were losing lots of
money. I wanted him to figure out why and
where we were losing, and what could be done.
After a year he said, “Pop, sell it. There’s no way
it can make a profit.” There are many people
in the business looking for an easy way to
make money. Unless it’s your son, no matter
who you hire, they will make an agreement
with the suppliers. If you order three bottles
of Scotch, the supplier will only send one, and
the manager will sign off for three. Then they
will split the remaining two. So you will pay
for three, but get only one to sell, and you lose
money. The more clients you have, the more
money you will lose. The more guests in the
restaurant, the more you lose.
He wanted to join Hemant at RMS. Hemant
was happy for him to join, but I said no. I
don’t want to put my two eggs in one basket.
If Hemant fails, you both fail. If he succeeds,
Haresh C. Shah • Family
he will succeed on his own. I want you to start
something different on your own. If you fail,
you always have family support. If you succeed,
it’s you who succeed.
He started his own company, Stanford
Management Group. Then Stanford University
called him one day and said you have started
a company called Stanford Management
Group. How did you do that? Because we have
a Stanford Management Group, which runs a
$20 billion portfolio for Stanford. We want you
to change the name.
Mihir said he wasn’t going to change the name.
He did it legally, went through the proper
process to get the name. Stanford asked him
how much money he wanted in order to change
the name. Mihir explained that to change the
name was changing a brand, and asked them
to pay for the expenses to change the name.
Stanford did, so he started something different.
He has been a serial entrepreneur for the last
25 years. He took two or three companies from
early investment to big investment.
Chapter 10
Passion for People
Anagnos: You are always very busy. When
you aren’t working, or innovating, changing
the world, or running non-profit foundations,
or teaching people things, what are your
favorite pastimes? What do you like to do?
Shah: What I am doing now. That’s what
I like to do. I love people. I truly love people.
Irrespective of their station in life. Nowadays I
like to work with people who are just unfortunate to be in a bad situation, but good people.
So I work with our own foundation. I work
with motivating people as to why they should
educate themselves, and get out of the vicious
cycle of poverty. I do things like that quite a bit
now, and I enjoy doing it because it gives me
personal satisfaction. As they say, the greatest
pleasure is in giving, not receiving. And it’s
true, at least for me, it’s true. I do what I enjoy
and I enjoy it, this kind of thing.
Anagnos: Very entrepreneurial.
Shah: Very entrepreneurial. People love him
as soon as they see him, how can we support
you? Can we be part of what you are doing?
He’s amazing, really amazing.
85
Photos
Photos of
Haresh Shah
87
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
1943 photo of the Shah family. Sitting on ground (L to R): Vinod Shah (brother of Manhar
Shah), Surya (sister), Haresh, Shashikant (brother). Sitting in chairs (L to R): Vijya (sister),
Ramangauri (Mother), Chandulal (Father), Manhar Shah (Chandrakanta’s husband),
Chandrakanta (sister), Indu (sister). Standing: children’s caregivers and mother’s helpers.
88
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Chandulal Shah’s Emelie shop in Pune that sold women’s and children’s clothes.
89
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
High school trip to New Delhi to visit Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954. Haresh
is to the right and behind the man in the tie who is standing next to the Prime Minister.
90
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Haresh’s mother and father wishing him farewell as he is about to board the SS
Strathnaver of the P&O Line to travel from Bombay to Southampton, August 4, 1959.
91
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
William Venuti and Haresh Shah at
PhD graduation ceremony, Stanford 1963.
Wedding of Haresh and Joan, 1965.
92
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Helen (sister), Wilhelmina (mother), Joan, Roland (brother) and Willem (father) Dersjant.
93
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Haresh Shah and Jim Gere preparing a shake table demonstration for the
John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center opening on September 17, 1976.
94
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Haresh Shah at the Blume Center opening in 1976 showing
John Blume the Fourier analyzer, which was gifted by HP to Stanford.
95
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
John Blume, Provost Bill Miller and Haresh Shah at the John A. Blume
Earthquake Engineering Center opening, September 17, 1976.
96
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
California Department of Water Resources engineer,
Arnold Eskel (lower left) at one of the switchyards
for the California Aqueduct (early 1970s) when
Blume Center researchers were studying dynamic
properties of switchyard equipment.
97
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Chinese delegates to the 2nd U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering from
the People’s Republic of China, 1979. Front row (L to R): Haresh C. Shah, Nie Fenglan,
Li Jingzhao, Ye Yaoxian, Xie Junfei, Gong Yongsong.
Back row (L to R): Jin Guoliang, Yu Li, Chen Dasheng, Sun Shaoping, Liu Xihui.
98
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Jim and Janice Gere, and Haresh and Joan Shah
with colleagues and hosts 1980 trip to Tangshan, China.
99
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Haresh Shah reviewing damage to the Stanford Memorial Church after the
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Anne Kiremidjian is on the far right.
100
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
L to R: Joan Shah, S. R. Nathan, Umi Nandey (wife of Nathan),
Haresh Shah at the National Technical University of Singapore, 2008
101
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
First school built in the village of Milethi to provide computer
education (2004). As of 2024 the school has expanded to a new site
that supports 1200 students, grades K through pre-college.
102
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Members of the Uganda Seismic Safety Association,
including founding president Badru M. Kiggundu (directly to the left
of Haresh) at WSSI High Level Meeting in Uganda, 1997.
103
Photos
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Haresh giving talk at 1997 WSSI High Level
Meeting in Kampala, Uganda.
104
Haresh C. Shah
Photos
Shah family 2015: (L to R) Hemant, Haresh, Joan, and Mihir.
105
Index
Index
A
C
Asia Risk Transfer Solutions 80
California State Water Project
electrical equipment 34
seismic risk analysis 34
California Universities for Research in
Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) 58
CUREE-Kajima Joint Research
Program 60
SAC Joint Venture Project 60
Center for Integrated Facility Engineering
(CIFE) 54
Cornell, C. Allin 17, 29, 31
Stanford PhD thesis 20
B
Bendimerad, Fouad 45
Benjamin, Jack R. 13–15, 17–19, 24
Blume Earthquake Engineering Center
founding 32
impact 38
public policy research 33
seismic hazard methodology 33
Blume, John A. 15, 17, 32, 36.
Alexander building 32
Blume Earthquake Engineering
Center 32
Boissonade, Auguste 37, 45
Bolt, Bruce 59
D
Dalal, Jagat 31
Dersjant, Wilhelmina
mother-in-law 81
Dersjant, Willem
father-in-law 81
Dong, Weimin 36, 44, 45, 46
107
Index
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
E
Earth Observatory of Singapore 70
EERI Shah Family Innovation Prize 78
El-Asnam, Algeria Earthquake 1980 38
Emelie Foundation 58, 74–75, 77
Emelie store 3, 89
F
International Decade for Natural Hazard
Reduction 61
Iwan, Wilfred D. 60, 61
J
Jacobsen, Lydik 15, 32
Jobe, Edward 47
Flügge, Wilhelm 15
K
G
Kiremidjian, Anne S. 29, 56
Koyna Dam 6
Kumagai Professorship 54
Gere, James M. 15, 25
Blume Earthquake Engineering Center
32
Stanford colleague 83
Tangshan, China 34
Gibbons, Jim 54
Grandori, Giuseppe 28, 62
Guaning, Su 68, 70
Gunturi, Surya 45
H
Hutton, Thompson 45, 46
I
International Association for Earthquake
Engineering (IAEE) 61
108
L
Lieberman, Gerald 18
M
Mortgat, Christian P. 29, 37, 45
N
Nathan, S.R. 68
National Center for Earthquake Engineering
Research (NCEER) 58
NTU Shah Family Prize 79
NTU Singapore 67–72
Earth Observatory of Singapore 70
Guaning, Su 68, 70
Haresh C. Shah
Institute of Catastrophe Risk
Management (ICRM) 70
Nathan, S.R. 68
Pan, Tso-Chien (T.C.) 68
Senior Academic Advisor 69
Sieh, Kerry 70
O
Obayashi Endowed Professorship 54
P
Pan, Tso-Chien (T.C.) 65, 68
Pate Cornell, Elisabeth 33, 56
Pauschke, Joy 56
Probabilistic methods research 19–20
R
Rahnama, Mohsen 45
Risk Management Solutions (RMS)
Crop Insurance Scheme 80
first clients 46
founding 43
global company 47
HAZUS development 48
investors 49
IRAS risk system 40
Oyo-RMS, Tokyo 47
Robertson, Steve 46
Rosenblueth, Emilio 29
Index
S
Sauter, Franz 31
Second U.S. National Conference on
Earthquake Engineering 35
Seismic hazard maps 29
Algeria 31
Guatemala 30
Nicaragua 29
Seismic hazard methodology
STASHA computer program 33, 40
Shah, Chandulal
father 1
Shah, Haresh C.
Algeria incident 37
Asia Risk Transfer Solutions 80
Civil Engineering Dept. Chair 53
Dastur High School 4
EERI Shah Family Innovation Prize 78
G. K. H. Mandal School 4
graduate students supervised 57
helicopter rotor fatigue 24
Milethi school 77
NTU Senior Academic Advisor 69
NTU Shah Family Prize 79
nuclear fallout shelters 21, 24
Pingat Bakti Masyarakat medal 72
probabilistic methods courses 22
public policy research 33
seismic hazard maps 29
Stanford graduate school 11–16
Stanford PhD thesis 19
Stanford professor 24
Stanford retirement 56
Stanford Shah Family Fund 79
Tangshan, China 34
University of Pennsylvania 22, 23
University of Pune 6
Wadia College 6
women students 58
109
Index
Connections: The EERI Oral History Series
Shah, Hemant 82
Risk Management Solutions (RMS) 44,
46
son 22
Shah, Joan Dersjant
Emelie Foundation 75
family and backbround 81
marriage 22
wife 22
Shah, Mihir 84
son 84
Shah, Ramangauri
mother 1
Shah, Shashikant C.
brother 1
Shah, Surya
sister 4
Shore, Sidney 22
Sieh, Kerry 70
Stanford Shah Family Fund 79
STASHA computer program 33, 40
Stojanovski, Pane 45
Symbiosis International University 71
T
Tangshan, China 34
Timoshenko, Stephen P. 16
Troika! The Remarkable Ascent of a Great
Global University 69
V
VanderMarck, Paul 45
Venuti, William 17
Stanford PhD thesis 19
W
Watabe, Makoto 54
Weaver, William 16
Whitman, Robert V. 29
Williams, Harry 15
World Seismic Safety Initiative (WSSI)
Bangladesh 63
dissolved 2009 65
first meeting 62
framework 62
global seismic safety community 64
High Level Meeting (HLM) project 62,
63
Myanmar 63
Uganda 36, 63
Y
Young, Donovan 14, 16
Z
Zsutty, Theodore C. 17, 40
seismic hazard maps 31
Stanford PhD thesis 19
110
Today catastrophe risk models are widely used to estimate casualties and other losses for
natural and human-caused hazards ranging from earthquakes to cyber data breaches. In the
1960s, when Haresh C. Shah began his career as a Stanford professor, he and his students
were pioneers in the early development of seismic hazard and risk models. This EERI oral
history documents establishment of the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at
Stanford and its groundbreaking research, the founding of Risk Management Solutions (RMS)
and its growth into a global corporation with hundreds of employees on four continents,
and Haresh’s contributions to the broader earthquake engineering community through the
California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) and the World
Seismic Safety Initiative (WSSI). Haresh discusses his passions for education, public safety,
and humanitarian work and how he has applied his passions to transforming the Nanyang
Technological University Singapore, as well as establishing numerous prizes to foster innovation and foundations to support the needy.
ISBN 978-0-943198-56-9
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