In December, David O. Prevatt, Ph.D., the Kisinger Campo & Associates Term Professor within the UF Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure and Environment (ESSIE), wrote a guest essay in The Washington Post to address the distressing impacts of the tornado outbreak that killed 93 people and destroyed hundreds of houses in Kentucky. He reminded readers that it has been known how to design hazard-resilient communities for decades, but society has not committed to raising our the building standards throughout the Tornado Alley. Dr. Prevatt was also featured on NPR’s All Things Considered program, the Black Network News Channel and The Weather Channel.
As a professional engineer and wind engineer, Dr. Prevatt has devoted nearly two decades of research focused on resolving the inordinately large extent of catastrophic failures that befall single-family residential buildings. He has participated in dozens of post-tornado and post-hurricane damage surveys since 2004.
He currently serves as a Co-PI and Associate Director for Wind Hazards of the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network, supported by the National Science Foundation and its mission is to deepen the structural natural hazards engineering community’s capacity for reliable post-event reconnaissance. For more information, visit Dr. Prevatt’s profile listing.