Yumei Wang holds dual roles at Portland State University, serving as both Affiliate Faculty and Senior Advisor on Infrastructure Resilience and Risk in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science, as well as Affiliate Faculty and Senior Advisor on Community Resilience and Disaster Preparedness in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions. Wang’s primary research interests relate to the transformation of communities from vulnerability to resilience in the face of disasters, including Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis. She has extensive experience with post-earthquake investigations around the world, which has informed her research.
Her engineering work intersects with policy and media communications, and includes over 100 publications. She served as a Congressional Fellow in the U.S. Senate in Washington DC, and has appeared on PBS NewsHour, OPB, NOVA, National Geographic, and Discovery. Wang is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and past-chair of their Council on Disaster Risk Management and Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering. She received her BA in Geological Sciences from University of California at Santa Barbara and MS in Civil Engineering from University of California at Berkeley.
Wang is a licensed professional engineer in the state of Oregon and licensed engineering geologist in the state of Washington. Among other awards, she received the 2018 ASCE LeVal Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction and the 2022 Engineer of the Year from the Professional Engineers of Oregon. Wang outlines urgent public needs in response to her 2022 Public Service award from the Geological Society of America here: GSA Public Service Award - 2022 (geosociety.org).
Research Interest and Expertise
- Preparing communities for magnitude 9 Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis
- Improving seismic performance of civic infrastructure and lifeline systems, primarily involving schools, hospitals, and the energy sector
- Creating and implementing transformative solutions for challenging societal problems related to disaster resilience