EPICentre: Earthquake and People Interaction Centre. A research group that brings together earthquake engineers, social scientists, coastal engineers and statisticians to provide decision makers with better guidance for where and how to invest to mitigate earthquake related losses.

The research in EPICentre is carried out through a number of multidisciplinary projects funded by research councils and industry. The current projects focus on violent flow (tsunami) loss prediction, vulnerability to volcanic ashfall, earthquake vulnerability, earthquake risk perception, using remote sensing to determine resilience of communities and the seismic damage assessment and retrofit of structures.

Highlights are:

• The development of a new generation system for producing realistic tsunami in a laboratory environment
• Innovative experiments to characterise tsunami impact on coastal structures
• Leading on an international project for the development of guidelines for empirical vulnerability assessment under earthquake loads for the Global Earthquake Model.
• Multi-cultural study of earthquake risk perception and identification of psychological barriers to earthqauke mitigation
• Intervention study in Seattle (USA) and Izmir (Turkey) to change people's preparedness behaviours for fire andearthquakes
  
• Numerous post-earthquake and post-tsunami reconnaissance missions and participation in the development of the Virtual Disaster Viewer for the identification of earthquake damage using remotely sensed data
• Large-scale tests on reinforced concrete columns and beam-column connections for the development of better damage prediction tools.

A full description of the EPICentre projects can be found at www.ucl.ac.uk/epicentre