Mustafa Özder Erdik, Professor of Earthquake Engineering Department of Earthquake Engineering, Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute,Bogazici University was awarded the Bruce A Bolt Medal at EERI's Annual Meeting in February 2013, which was held in Seattle this year.

Professor Erdik is recognized by engineers and seismologists worldwide as an expert on strong motion characterization, earthquake hazard and risk assessment. Following his Ph.D. in 1975 from Rice University, he joined Middle East Technical University in Ankara and served as the Director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Center. In 1988 he joined Bog?aziçi University in Istanbul. He founded the Department of Earthquake Engineering in 1989, one of the few in the world, and has mentored and supervised fifty graduate students. After the 1999 Izmit earthquake, Mustafa became a central figure in understanding the earthquake’s toll, an advocate for monitoring and mitigation, and a key architect of his nation’s future scientific course.

The Istanbul Earthquake Rapid Response and Early Warning System, composed of 200 real-time strong-motion accelerometers and 5 sea-bottom accelerometers in the Marmara Sea, was built and operated under Mustafa’s direction. Because of his efforts, Istanbul today is among the best-instrumented megacities on Earth, monitoring that extends from the great dome of 1500-year-old Hagia Sofia to cabled undersea stations in the Marmara Sea. Because the Marmara fault lies offshore, the sea-bottom stations will be the first to detect a great earthquake, and so are crucial to early warning.For his outstanding work promoting the expansion of the strong-motion networks in Turkey and Central Asia, Mustafa was awarded the NATO Summit Science Prize in 2004.

Mustafa is equally devoted to instrumenting buildings. He has directed the installation of structural health monitoring arrays in UNESCO World Heritage treasures Hagia Sophia and Suleymaniye Mosque, as well as in suspension bridges, tunnels and tall buildings, nuclear facilities, LNG tanks, and petroleum pipelines. For this vital work, he received the European Award for Conservation of Cultural Heritage in 1994 by the Ford Foundation. Starting with his landmark probabilistic seismic hazard assessment for Turkey in 1985, Mustafa has focused on the vulnerability of large urban centers. This was a prescient insight, as today we all have come to recognize that with population pouring into megacities, the threat of urban earthquakes is the Achilles heel of the modern world. Mustafa directed the development of a new algorithm for urban earthquake risk assessment, producing sobering scenario loss assessments for Izmir, Istanbul, Tashkent, and Bishkek. Much of this work appeared in the book Issues on Urban Earthquake Risk, co-edited with Brian Tucker. For these contributions, Mustafa was awarded the United Nations Sasakawa Disaster Prevention Award in 1999.

Mustafa has an outstanding record of original research contributions, and since 1995 he has been editor-in-chief of Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, and is the currently president of the Turkish Earthquake Engineering Research Committee.

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