Ongoing doctoral work
Research
Emmanuel Randle's doctoral research on earthquake and tsunami risk, spatial correlation, damage modeling, and population displacement.
What changes when damage is correlated?
My research examines how spatial correlation in earthquake ground motion affects regional damage and residential population displacement. A central question is whether the dependence assumptions that appear reasonable for individual buildings also produce realistic estimates for a whole community.
My work with Andre R. Barbosa at Oregon State University includes a Seaside, Oregon case study linking ground motion to correlated damage patterns and displacement outcomes. My current doctoral project receives support through the NSF Cascadia CoPes Hub.
Following dependence through the model
Spatial ground motion is one part of a larger problem. My broader doctoral work follows uncertainty and correlation through earthquake and tsunami intensity measures, engineering demand parameters, and damage-related variables.
I am interested in how these relationships affect building functionality, debris, casualties, and population displacement. This requires keeping track of uncertainty as one model’s output becomes the next model’s input.
Methods: Monte Carlo simulation, correlation matrices, Gaussian copulas, fragility and damage-state models, HAZUS-based regional analysis, and reproducible scientific computing.
Earthquake and tsunami risk
My interests extend to the dependence between hazards and their consequences. Training at the PTRA workshop at GFZ in Potsdam supports my work in probabilistic tsunami risk analysis.
Connections to insurance and reinsurance
My independent Seismic Correlation and Insurance Loss project applies my interest in dependence to insured portfolio loss, reinsurance, and parametric protection. It is a separate portfolio project with its own synthetic exposure and financial assumptions.
The connection is a modeling question: which assumptions materially change the decisions made from a risk estimate?