Vitor Silva

NH Natural Hazards

The 2020 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Vitor Silva for his fundamental contributions to the research on earthquake risk assessment.

Vitor Silva is the Seismic Risk Coordinator at the Global Earthquake Model Foundation, where he and his team of more than 12 risk engineers focus on seismic hazard and risk analyses and the development of open-source tools to estimate damage and losses in buildings, critical facilities, infrastructure and lifelines. He has participated in and/or coordinated national, European and international projects with an aggregated budget of more than 3M EUR, leading to the creation of uniform and transparent seismic risk models for countries all over the world, including in South and Central America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan African, and South Asia.

The tools, models and datasets developed by Silva’s team have made significant contributions to scientific research and applications as they are currently being used by hundreds of engineers and risk modellers in both the private and public sectors. Silva recently coordinated the development of GEM’s Global Seismic Risk Model, which was released in December 2018 and has since been accessed more than 13,000 times. He has also organised several workshops for knowledge transfer and/or capacity building, with a particular focus on developing countries.

Since 2013 Silva has published 48 studies in the top peer-reviewed international journals on earthquake hazard and engineering and has been invited to co-author book chapters on earthquake risk assessment by the European Commission and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction. In recognition of his early achievements, Vitor Silva has already been awarded the Carlos Sousa Oliveira award in 2017 and the Shah Family Innovation Award in 2018.