The medal, considered one of the most prestigious in the field, is awarded in memory of the California state senator and assemblyman who died in 2006. The Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission supports programs statewide aimed at reducing earthquake risks to life and property.
Dengler received the award from the California Earthquake Safety Foundation at the annual meeting of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in Salt Lake City, February 11-14.
In its citation, the foundation said, “As founder and director of the Humboldt Earthquake Education Center, Lori has served California’s coastal communities as an enthusiastic advocate for earthquake and tsunami public education. She is the principal author of Living on Shaky Ground, an illustrated earthquake and tsunami survival guide tailored to California’s North Coast but applicable statewide.”
Humboldt State’s Scholar of the Year in 2008, Dengler was chair of the Department of Geology from 2005 to 2008 and is at work on the fourth edition of Living on Shaky Ground. She is a featured tsunami expert on the NOVA Web site, “The Wave That Shook the World.”
Dengler has been a member of illustrious international post-tsunami survey teams, including Crescent City (2006), Indonesia (2005), Southern Peru (2001) and Papua New Guinea (1998).
Over a period of many years, she compiled a geologic and historic record of tsunamis that occurred in northwestern California and used it as the foundation for tsunami hazard mitigation. Colleagues draw constantly on her tsunami inundation maps of the region.
Director of the Humboldt Earthquake Education Center since 1986, Dengler joined HSU in 1979 and has served as a top leader of Redwood Coast initiatives to improve earthquake and tsunami preparedness. The University’s Department of Geology sits astride the Cascadia subduction zone, which the faculty uses as a natural laboratory for student field research and exercises.
A member of the team that developed the United States National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program in 1995, Dengler served as California’s scientific representative on the program’s steering committee from 1996 to 2003. She authored the program’s Strategic Implementation Plan for Mitigation Projects in 1998.
In 2007, Dengler was the co-convener of a meeting sponsored by the National Science Foundation to examine future directions for tsunami research in the United States.
Dengler was the first recipient of NOAA’s Richard Hagemeyer Tsunami Mitigation Award for her leadership and role in the Redwood Coast Tsunami Work Group and a host of related community and statewide activities.
She earned her doctorate at U.C. Berkeley in 1979, where she also earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees. Her research centers on earthquake intensity studies and tsunami and earthquake mitigation.