Prof. Kimiro Meguro

Dr. Kimiro MEGURO is a Director and Professor of ICUS, established in April 2001 at the Institute of Industrial Institute (IIS), the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) and a President of Japan Association of Earthquake Engineering (JAEE). After receiving his PhD. degree from UTokyo in 1991, he joined International Center for Disaster-Mitigation Engineering (INCEDE) as one of the founding members. ICUS is a successor research center of INCEDE.

Dr. MEGURO has wide range of research field in disaster management and urban safety from structural to non-structural measures. As a specialist of numerical simulation, he has developed several new models by which total behavior of structures and/or materials from a sound state to a complete discrete state can be simulated. Applying these models, he has been studying dynamic failure behavior of structures that is highly nonlinear and very difficult to be simulated by conventional models. While in the other field, or as a specialist of non-structural measures and policy making, he has proposed some important social systems and policies. He has been working on the human evacuation problems during disaster and he has come out with the idea of a new model in which evacuation behavior of large number of people having different characteristics and changes of circumstances of the evacuation field in case of disaster can be simulated. He is also studying the application of new technologies, like virtual reality, GIS/RS, and/or ICT to disaster management and urban safety issues, such as evacuation, fire-fighting drill, risk assessment, disaster information management, and disaster education, etc.

He is featured in Focus On: Disasters, an Asia Research News resource for journalists to find stories and sources.