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GEM held a two-week specialist course on seismic vulnerability modelling at the EUCENTRE Foundation in Pavia from 20 to 31 July 2026. Offered within the Doctoral Programme in Earthquake Engineering at IUSS Pavia, the course combined theoretical lectures with practical exercises and a case study.

Al Mouayed Bellah Nafeh, GEM’s Physical Vulnerability Lead, and Karim Aljawhari, Physical Vulnerability Modeller, led the training, with teaching support from Furkan Narlitepe, a PhD student at IUSS Pavia/GEM.

A case study guided the exercises across the two weeks. Participants began by examining how buildings respond to shaking, then used those analyses to derive fragility functions and estimate losses with the OpenQuake Vulnerability Modeller’s Toolkit.

Lectures and practical exercises traced the relationship between structural response, damage and losses to structural elements, nonstructural components and building contents.

During the second week, participants assembled vulnerability models for use in the OpenQuake Engine and applied them in earthquake scenarios, linking ground shaking with building damage and losses. They also discussed questions arising from their analyses.

The programme also considered the environmental consequences of damage and reconstruction, extending vulnerability assessment beyond conventional economic losses. Work on earthquake sequences examined how buildings respond after sustaining damage, an area being explored by GEM’s research team.

A final examination concluded the course, assessing participants’ understanding of the methods and their practical application.

The hands-on case study took participants from structural analysis to vulnerability modelling and loss estimation using GEM’s OpenQuake tools.