Out of the 40 technical presentations from different countries, Xavier University Class 2020 Valedictorian, Engr Jameson Lim, was awarded with “Best Presentation” at the 17th APRU Multi-Hazards Symposium 2022. The event was held at Bangkok, Thailand on November 29-30.

The Multi-Hazards Symposium is an annual event by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU). The event is intended to bring together thought leaders, researchers, and policymakers to exchange ideas and collaborate on practical solutions to the challenges of the 21st century. As an international organization, the APRU is comprised of leading universities from 19 economies of the Pacific Rim, linking more than 2 million students and more than 200,000 faculty members across the Americas, Asia, and Australasia.

For the year 2022, the symposium, with the theme “Innovation Towards Sustainable Growth and Disaster Risk Reduction,” was organized by the Faculty of Engineering and the Risk and Disaster Management Program of Chulalongkorn University in collaboration with the APRU. In line with this year’s theme, Engr Jameson Lim presented a paper titled ‘Seismic Fragility of Selected Public High School Buildings in Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines.’ This paper is from a thesis project he did with his classmates: Engr Jerson Castro, Engr Marvin Alama and Engr Daisy Salugsugan. Their mentors were Engr Dexter Lo, currently Vice President for Social Development, and Dr Arash Nassirpour of the University College London. The XU – UCL collaboration is made possible from years of working together on Safe Schools Projects between the two universities. In XU, this is implemented through the Social Development Office.

The project presented was about the determination of the structural capacity of eight public high school buildings in Cagayan de Oro City by generating structural fragility curves for each building using the Fragility through Capacity Spectrum Assessment method. Aligned with the symposium’s theme, the project is innovative towards sustainable growth since it promotes an arising engineering technique of predicting the potential seismic damages to buildings using fragility curves, and it promotes disaster risk reduction as the identified critical points of each building were recommended to the City Engineers Office of Cagayan de Oro for strengthening measures.

At the end of Engr Lim's presentation, he left these words to the participants, “With our project, we hope to encourage and motivate everyone in the engineering field, that we, with engineering knowledge, can enhance the future better using insights from past events; hence, may we be able to use this ability to create more resilient communities and much safer schools.”