E2SCALA Team
E2SCALA stands for Earthquake Engineering and Seismology Community Alliance in Latin America and the Caribbean. E2SCALA is a National Science Foundation funded central online repository and virtual collaboration environment for students and early career professionals with interest in reducing seismic risks in the region.
Ashly Cabas
Director & Founder
Ashly Cabas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University, where she leads the Geohazards and Earthquake Engineering Research Lab (GeoQuake). Her research team takes an interdisciplinary approach to the assessment of seismic hazards (including earthquake ground shaking and ground failure). She completed her undergraduate studies at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB) in Caracas, Venezuela, and she earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech. Dr. Cabas was awarded the 2022 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and she was recently re-elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the Seismological Society of America.
Jenny Ramirez
Executive Committee Member, founding member
Jenny is a geotechnical engineer with technical expertise focused on site characterization and numerical analyses for solving geotechnical engineering related problems in the design of dams, landfills, tailings storage facilities, and other earthen structures. She has extensively worked on developing numerous two- and three-dimensional (3D) data visualization tools to summarize large geotechnical databases. Jenny’s expertise also includes seismic response analyses, soil-foundation-mitigation-structure interaction analyses on liquefiable soils, 3D numerical groundwater/hydrogeological analyses, and forensic analyses. Jenny has in-hands experience with task automation to optimize workflow processes and streamline decisions and she is active member of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance (GEER) Team.
Ashley Morales-Cartagena
Executive Committee Member, founding member
Ashley Morales-Cartagena is a civil engineer specializing in geosciences and disaster risk reduction with 15 years of experience bridging diverse roles in academia, industry, and public sectors. She is the founder and director of the Multi-Hazard Risk and Resilience Research Center (CIRRMA) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) where she also served as the CEE department chair. She led the Disaster Risk Management and Geotechnical Engineering departments at National Bureau of Seismic Evaluation of Infrastructure and Buildings (ONESVIE). Ashley’s work has spanned building social infrastructure and managing disaster risk reduction projects across Latin America and the Caribbean working with international development agencies.
Renmin Pretell
Executive Committee Member, founding member
Renmin is an assistant professor of geotechnical engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. Renmin holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Davis, and a B.S. in civil engineering from the National University of Engineering (UNI), Peru. Prior to graduate school, Renmin worked as a consulting engineer for five years with Golder Associates at the Lima and Denver offices, and as a postdoctoral scholar with the Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the University.
Kelly Guerrier
Executive Committee Member, founding member
Kelly Guerrier is a civil engineer from the State University of Haiti (UEH) and holds a doctorate in engineering sciences from the Université catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He teaches at the Faculty of Sciences at UEH and is a member of the Geosciences Research Unit (URGéo-CARIBACT) and the Urban Planning and Territorial Development Research Unit (URBALAB) at his university. He is currently working extensively on using illustration to popularize (in Haitian Creole and French) the results of his research within Haitian society.
Gonzalo Montalva
Executive Committee Member, founding member
Professional engineer with over 20 years of experience in multiscale geotechnical characterization and modeling applied to seismic safety and the development of non-ergodic seismic demand models for subduction zones. Throughout his career, he has led and/or participated in 14 publicly funded R&D projects and published his work in more than 40 scientific articles and/or books. He is a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Concepción. He is a past president of the Chilean Geotechnical Society and director of the EASER Research Ring on seismic risk evolution, among other research projects. His work focuses on the effect of surface geology on the seismic response of engineering structures.