Dr. Itani is a licensed Civil Engineer in the States of Nevada and California and Structural Engineer in the State of California. Dr. Itani’s expertise lies in the experimental and analytical evaluation of structures and nonstructural components under extreme loading.
He has conducted large scale experiments on many long span bridges in California. He performed experiments on the new Moscone Center in San Francisco and the UCLA hospital in Los Angeles. He is a fellow member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a member of EERI

Dr. Laplace has been a laboratory manager at a structures research laboratory for 10 years and has over 15 years of experience in real-time servo-hydraulic and digital control systems and development, design, installation, set-up, testing, and analysis of structural research projects. He develops data acquisition systems for various installations around the world, and his research interests include servo hydraulic control and simulation, non-structural component seismic qualification testing, data acquisition and instrumentation systems, and seismic and vibration simulation systems. A published research expert in shake table testing and analysis, Dr. Laplace has been involved in the installation and operation of multiple large-scale seismic shake table systems and support systems required for experimentation on large scale specimens.

Dr. Pekcan’s expertise lies in the theoretical and experimental aspects of earthquake engineering and structural dynamics, focusing on earthquake hazard mitigation; experimental and analytical studies of seismic performance of buildings and bridges; and seismic performance evaluation of nonstructural systems (equipment) and other components primarily used in critical facilities. The latter includes shake-table qualification testing of wall-mounted TV monitor arms, mobile shelving units, radiography and fluoroscopy systems and components (e.g. patient tables, control units, ceiling-mount tube suspensions), CT scanners, gantry, surgical lighting, main frame servers, monitoring panels, battery boxes, antenna extrusions, generators, chillers, air handling units, etc. to satisfy the requirements of AC156, GR-63-CORE, and IEEE 344/693. Dr. Pekcan has been one of the contributors in the development of ATC-58 - Interim Shake Table Test Protocol for Quantifying Seismic Fragility of Motion-Sensitive Nonstructural Components. He is a member of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE), and Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).