Rajesh Rupakhety is a professor at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty at the University of Iceland, and Director of Research at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre of the University of Iceland. He obtained his BS in Civil Engineering from Tribhuwan University, Nepal, his MSc in Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology from the University of Pavia, Italy and the University of Patras, Greece, and a PhD in Earthquake Engineering from the University of Iceland. Areas of his academic interest are solid and fluid mechanics, structural analysis and design, engineering seismology, and earthquake engineering. Within the fields of solid and fluid mechanics, he has hands on experience in design and construction of hydropower systems. He has professional and research experience in analysis and design of structures for seismic action. In engineering seismology, his research activities include processing of strong motion data, modelling of inelastic response spectra, theoretical and empirical ground motion modelling and prediction, modelling of ground motion random field, quantification of near-fault ground motion, local site effects, and soil amplification. He is also active in use of historical and macroseismic data, probabilistic and deterministic seismic hazard assessment, and seismic hazard assessment for facilities storing hazardous mining waste, and seismic design provisions for hydropower and wind power plants in Iceland. His primary teaching activities are in continuum mechanics, computational mechanics, finite element analysis, structural dynamics, stochastic processes and random vibration, and earthquake engineering. Símon Ólafsson is a research professor and the Director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre of the University of Iceland, Selfoss. He received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the same university in 1981 and his MSc degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1990. In 1999, he earned his PhD on the dynamics of structures and response to earthquake loading from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. During the 1980s, he worked with Professor Ragnar Sigbjörnsson on various instrumentation projects and, most notably, the establishment of the Icelandic Strong Motion Network. His main research interests are engineering seismology and earthquake engineering. His ongoing research projects deal with strong-motion monitoring and signal processing, source mechanics, ground motion modelling using stochastic, discrete time models, earthquake hazard, and system identification. Bjarni Bessason (born 1957), finished a PhD in Earthquake Engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1992. He worked from 1991 to 1995 at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI) in Oslo and then moved to Iceland where he currently is a Professor in Civil Engineering at University of Iceland. Bjarni has a wide background in structural and earthquake engineering in both research and consulting projects. Main fields of work have been related to: seismic vulnerability analysis; seismic hazard analysis; seismic base isolation; earthquake response analysis; system identification; geophysical characterisation of sites by seismic investigations (SASW, MASW); vibrations from railway, car traffic, pedistrians and blasts; detection analysis of snow avalanches with wave measurements. He is an author/co-author of over 150 scientific papers and technical reports.
