A series of devastating earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing more than 55,000 people in one of the region’s deadliest natural disasters in decades.  

In the aftermath, search and rescue teams struggled to operate after their own equipment was damaged. Hospitals collapsed, forcing injured survivors to travel long distances to access urgent medical care. 

According to Luis Ceferino, an expert in disaster risk and modeling, multiple emergency response systems failed at once — including communications, rescue operations, and power infrastructure — disrupting what engineers call the “earthquake survival chain.”

But for Ceferino, this is where the work begins. 

An assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, Ceferino and his team move in after disasters, working on the ground to understand how and why infrastructure fails — and how governments can build city systems that are better equipped to withstand the next one.

He’s conducted post disaster field research all across the world. His work, including collaborations with institutions like the World Bank, examines risks to housing, hospitals, schools, and energy infrastructure in countries like the United States, Nepal, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Peru.

“(My work) gave me a lot of experience to start thinking about these questions, about failures of infrastructure and how they impact access to services that are very important after a disaster,” he said. 

“What I’m hoping to do with my work is inform governments of the best ways to invest in making things more resilient.”

Now, Ceferino is bringing that experience to the classroom as one of the newest faculty members to join UC Berkeley’s Graduate Group in Development Engineering.

As a new addition, he invites MDevEng students to participate in his research, mentoring them as they develop their own capstone projects. He also encourages students to take his recurring class, Disaster Risk Analysis: a course that introduces students to modeling extreme events and assessing which infrastructure systems are most vulnerable.

His interest in disasters began in Peru, where he grew up along the seismically active Ring of Fire, a belt of frequent earthquakes and volcanic activity encircling the Pacific Ocean. As a civil engineering student at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Lima, he witnessed firsthand how infrastructure failures can cut off access to essential services.

That early exposure shaped his focus on disaster prevention, particularly for communities with fewer resources at their disposal. 

“In civil engineering, we want to create better technology to improve the resiliency of society to these extreme events. One approach is to make things stronger — but that’s expensive,” he said. “I was very interested in the regional scale: ‘What can you do to make an entire city better if you have limited resources?’”

Over the course of his career, Ceferino has studied disasters ranging from earthquakes in Latin America to hurricanes in the United States. 

He noted, however, that fieldwork often changes the way he thinks about how engineers model risk, how communities respond, and how unexpected factors can influence recovery.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, he visited flooded neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey. In some coastal communities, flooding caused by the storm meant a sharp drop in home values, and homeowners still had mortgages to pay.  

Many residents couldn’t afford to rebuild, and the local real estate market meant that houses couldn’t be sold and families couldn’t relocate, causing conditions in these disadvantaged areas to worsen drastically. 

In the following years, the market became depressed. Traditional disaster risk models — which estimate repair costs and timelines based on materials, labor, and available funding — could not fully capture what many impacted families were experiencing. 

For Ceferino, the experience highlighted the importance of considering factors outside of engineering, such as economic and market dynamics, into disaster risk analysis — serious impacts of extreme events that go beyond physical destruction. 

“There are many instances in which we’re on the field and we talk to people, we see the infrastructure, and we learn new things about the mechanisms that control decision making in recovery experiences and disaster response,” he said. “Oftentimes it’s just different from how we thought.”

Experiences like these have also reinforced for Ceferino the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to disaster response. Engineers alone cannot solve these problems, he argues; economists, policymakers, and educators all play a role in shaping recovery.

Additionally, Ceferino believes that bringing in diverse perspectives can help engineers improve risk models, and also inform policies that guide recovery and prevention.

“If you’re repairing schools, you need someone who will prepare a plan for moving students around to ensure the learning objectives are not lost while you’re repairing infrastructure,” Ceferino said.

That perspective is what drew him to Development Engineering, a program that brings together students in disciplines ranging from global health to AI and data analytics to address the world’s most pressing humanitarian issues.  

The MDevEng is a 15-month program that prepares students for careers in social impact. Students take on a number of hands-on projects, including a summer internship and a final capstone project.  

In his Disaster Risk Analysis course, MDevEng and other students will learn the fundamentals of modeling disasters and predicting how infrastructure systems respond to extreme events. The class culminates in an open-ended project, where students apply their studies to real-world scenarios.

Last semester, Ceferino advised some MDevEng students with projects spanning risk modeling and disaster impacts — from analyzing how home elevation affects flood exposure in New York to using satellite imagery to track power outages after the Los Angeles wildfires.

In joining the DevEng Graduate Group, he formally supports MDevEng students with capstone projects, where some will have hands-on opportunities to work with Ceferino’s research group.

This coming Fall, students working with Ceferino on their MDevEng capstone will be involved in projects such as modeling non-recovery pathways in coastal communities facing flood risks, as well as studying hospital earthquake response strategies via immersive virtual reality.

He said he is currently focused on integrating into the program’s community and getting to know students, but hopes to eventually expand collaboration by co-advising capstone projects with other faculty. 

Beyond the data and modeling, Ceferino sees his DevEng affiliation as an opportunity to join a vibrant, collaborative community. 

“I think students just take an idea and give it its own direction, which is amazing,” Ceferino said. “I’m excited to be part of that kind of community and learn more about the students who come through the program.”