For those on the East Coast of the United States, two prominent schools that specialize in earthquake engineering stand out. The Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) is located at the University of Buffalo in New York and boasts a comprehensive program based on research and development. The other is the Center for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (CEES), which specializes in earthquake centrifugal modeling and is located at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
With its prevalence of earthquake activity, the West Coast is home to many of the schools based on this subject. This is especially evident in California as the civil engineering schools of Stanford, University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California, University of California San Diego and University of California Berkley all include earthquake engineering departments. With its research into geotechnical and earthquake engineering in cold climates, the University of Alaska at Anchorage is another school with a significant investment in this discipline.
Seismic activity is a threat to any nation with cities located along major fault lines. Recognizing this fact, schools for earthquake engineering have been established across the globe. Programs for a masters in earthquake engineering and engineering seismology are offered at universities such as the Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia in Italy and the Institute of Earthquake Engineering in China.
Earthquake engineering is actually listed as a subset of a branch of civil engineering called geotechinical engineering. These schools focus on how engineering relates to earth materials and building structure. Graduates focus on developing techniques that work toward reducing the damage cased by not only earthquakes but landslides, sinkholes and erosion.