Meet our faculty, Dr. Jeffrey Erochko

Future large earthquakes are inevitable in Eastern Canada along the Ottawa river valley and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Due to our geology, earthquakes in the east will also have a much larger area of effect. This makes it critically important that we not only design new buildings and emergency structures to be earthquake resistant, but that we also understand the behaviour of existing older buildings in earthquakes. Dr. Jeff Erochko’s research team works on developing new ways to design and retrofit buildings to address these problems.
Dr. Erochko completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, where he developed new self-centering cross-braces for buildings that prevent them from having a left-over lean at the end of an earthquake. Systems like this make it much more likely that a building will be able to be occupied and used after it experiences an earthquake. At Carleton, he has developed two new prototype self-centering brace types that improve on previous designs. His team is also working on incorporating advanced earthquake-resistant systems into tall wood buildings and on developing new ways to retrofit historic timber and masonry buildings to resist future earthquakes.
He is the co-leader (with Dr. Lau) of the new $5 million Multi-hazard Infrastructure Protection Facility at Carleton which features four movable large-scale shaking tables that replicate the effects of earthquakes in our laboratory. He is also a dedicated teacher and is working with the Canadian Wood Council to develop new open educational videos for teaching wood building design in Canada.
Outside of academia, he enjoys playing guitar, rollerblading in nice weather, and playing board games with his kids.