Sean Wilkinson

I am a structural engineer specialising in earthquake engineering. The aim of my research is to help develop communities that are resilient to natural hazard. I believe the best way of achieving this is by understanding how critical infrastructure responds in a disaster and what role it has in protecting communities. My specific methodology is to identify robust network architectures for critical infrastructure systems that are insensitive to the magnitude of the hazard to which they may be exposed and therefore suffer minimum disruption in the event of a disaster. This is an extension of the way earthquake engineers design their buildings whereby they treat them as systems that have ductile modes of failure which can absorb vast amounts of energy without collapse (bend not break). I also teach these concepts in my structural engineering design classes as well as teaching my specific expertise of earthquake engineering.