Canterbury University QuakeCoRE welcomed   15 Apr 2016

Hon Steven Joyce
Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment
15 April 2016

Canterbury University QuakeCoRE welcomed

Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment Minister Steven Joyce has today welcomed the opening of Canterbury University’s QuakeCore: Centre for Earthquake Resilience.

Mr Joyce also opened the University’s new Structural Engineering Laboratory which is the first building to be completed in the “Canterbury Engineering the Future” project funded by the Government in support of the University’s recovery. The laboratory will give researchers access to the latest earthquake technologies and is the largest facility of its type in New Zealand.

The Centre for Earthquake Resilience was selected for Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) funding last year by the Tertiary Education Commission and the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The centre brings together researchers from the University of Canterbury, University of Auckland, Victoria University, GNS Science, Massey University, the University of Waikato, Resilient Organisations and the Building Research Association of New Zealand.

“QuakeCore will lead the world in earthquake research and help give NewZealand communities the ability to recover quickly after major earthquakes through mitigation and pre-disaster preparation,” Mr Joyce says.

“This is obviously an area New Zealand has a keen interest in, it makes sense that we lead the world in this area. Central to this will be a research programme which gives us new information on how the built environment responds to earthquakes, the development of models to understand where and what the vulnerabilities are, and innovative tools and technologies.

“Canterbury is uniquely placed both because of its long and proud history training engineers, and because of its recent exposure to significant earthquakes.”

The CoREs Fund was established in 2001 to encourage the development of excellent tertiary education-based research that is collaborative and strategically focused.

A total of ten CoREs have now been funded through to 2020. The Government has now provided over $635 million in funding to the CoREs programme.
More information about CoREs can be found HERE

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