Woman of Steel: Zeynep Gulerce, Ph.D. '08
The earthquake engineer building a more resilient future
Zeynep Gulerce's career has been shaped by earthquakes. She was a young civil-engineer-in-training in Türkiye when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the Kocaeli Province of the country. It lasted 37 seconds and claimed more than 18,000 lives and injured tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and businesses.
Confronted by this devastation, Gulerce, like many in her generation, decided to dedicate her career to trying to ensure that never again would an earthquake take so much from so many people. After she graduated as a civil engineer, she obtained a master’s degree in earthquake engineering from Middle East Technical University, followed by a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis.
"I think my generation of civil engineers in Türkiye felt this responsibility on their shoulders: to prevent the loss of lives in the next big earthquake," Gulerce said.
After her Ph.D., Gulerce had no doubt where her responsibility lay. She returned to Türkiye, determined to apply the best practices she had learned, to compile as much data as possible about active faults and earthquakes, and to train the next generation of experts. Her goal was to ensure that when the next earthquake hit, countries would be better prepared to act to safeguard lives and property.
Over the next two decades, as a professor at her alma mater, Gulerce contributed to a variety of national and international projects, including a series of seismic hazard assessments for the critical infrastructure of Türkiye, and a NATO project to develop seismic hazard maps for the Western Balkan region. When Türkiye decided to re-start the national nuclear power programme, Zeynep was a natural choice as a seismic consultant for the nuclear regulatory authority. In this capacity, she also worked with the IAEA on a number of capacity-building missions. In 2022, she joined the External Events Safety Section of the Division of Nuclear Installation Safety as a Nuclear Safety Expert.
