Conference speakers

Biography

Engr. Ronaldo S. Ison is licensed civil/structural engineer in the Philippines. He is the owner and principal Civil/Structural Engineer of R.S. ISON & Associates which he founded in 1989. He specializes in the structural engineering design of low to high-rise buildings and has extensive professional practice in his country. He is a four-time President of the Association of Structural Engineers of the Philippines, from 2002-2004 and then in 2019-2021. In 2004, during his presidency in the ASEP, the ASEP founded the Asia Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Manila. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Institute of Civil Engineering. He is consistently a member of the National Structural Code of the Philippines codes development committee.

Biography

Pennung Warnitchai received his doctoral degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1990 and is currently Professor of Structural Engineering at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT).  He has been actively involved in research and practice in the fields of structural dynamics, earthquake engineering, wind effects on structures, bridge engineering, and disaster management.  Since 2002, he has been leading a long-term research program on "Mitigation of Earthquake Risk in Thailand" funded by the Thai Research Fund and later by the National Research Council of Thailand.  More than 30 researchers from ten universities and three government agencies in Thailand have participated in this program. In the professional organizations, he was the chairman of the chapter on the effects of earthquakes and wind loads at the Engineering Institute of Thailand (EIT) from 2002 to 2016.  He led a team of experts and professional engineers to develop the first official seismic design standard for buildings and structures in Thailand in 2009.  Several of his research team's findings, such as new design spectra for long-period ground motions in the Bangkok basin and a new method for analyzing the seismic response of tall buildings, were translated into code of practice in this seismic standard.  He is also currently Thailand's national delegate to the International Association for Earthquake Engineering (IAEE) and founding director of the Earthquake Research Center of Thailand (EARTH).