In hopes of reducing the toll of future major quakes in large metropolitan areas, the University of California, Davis, and eight other West Coast universities today announced a new multimillion-dollar research partnership. Called the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, the project will receive almost $6.5 million in first-year funding -- $2 million from the National Science Foundation, $2 million in matching funds from the University of California and the states of California and Washington, and $2.4 million from Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The NSF and UC-state funds are promised at the same level for an additional four years. "UC Davis is already heavily engaged in all aspects of earthquake research -- theoretical, experimental and applied," said Bruce Kutter, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of the new center's research committee. "Our facilities, such as the geotechnical centrifuge and the large-scale soil-structure interaction field-testing facility, will be important resources for the PEER Center goal of earthquake risk reduction." Those facilities are used for testing the earthquake resistance of buildings, bridges, port structures and industrial facilities. The geotechnical centrifuge at UC Davis is one of the world's largest, with a 5-ton payload and a 30-foot radius. A large shaking table that holds models of waterfront structures, bridges or building foundations is mounted on the end of the centrifuge. While the centrifuge applies acceleration up to 50 times the force of gravity to simulate gravity loads on the model, the shaking table is triggered to simulate earthquake vibrations. The large-scale field-testing facility, developed under the direction of Rob Chai, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, is new. It is a soil pit about 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep where full-size concrete piles can be loaded cyclically to simulate the effects of earthquakes. The data provided by these facilities will help researchers produce safer structural designs. With UC Davis, the partners in the PEER Center are the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles and San Diego; Stanford University; the California Institute of Technology; the University of Southern California; and the University of Washington in Seattle. Nine other universities in the western United States are project affiliates. UC Berkeley professor of civil engineering Jack Moehle is the center's director. Faculty from the disciplines of structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation engineering and geology will all collaborate on PEER projects. Economists and public-policy experts will also be involved. Teleconferencing facilities at each university will allow researchers to converse and share data easily. The center will also establish an education program, with elements aimed at K-12 students, university students and professionals seeking continuing education. NSF also funded two other new national earthquake engineering research centers at the same level: the Mid-America Earthquake Center, based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the Center for Advanced Technologies in Earthquake Loss Reduction, at the State University of New York in Buffalo.