Mr. Gath, President and a senior partner of Earth Consultants International, is a recognized leader in the evaluation of geologic hazards for project development and public policy planning.  His experience in municipal hazard mitigation is based on over 25 years of identifying and mitigating geologic hazards for development planning and in designing public policy programs for community hazard reduction. Mr. Gath was the Project Manager for the Hazard Mapping and Management Plan for Riverside County, California incorporating GIS-based hazard maps into public policy for disaster reduction. Most recently, he has been the Project Manager for a series of paleoseismic studies on the faults of central Panamá, as part of the design studies for the Panama Canal Expansion Program.

Ms. Tania Gonzalez, Project Geologist, Vice-President and a senior partner of Earth Consultants International, has over 18 years of experience in geological feasibility studies, fault hazard assessments, and public safety planning projects.  She has managed the preparation of over 20 municipal Safety Elements; these projects include detailed GIS-based hazard maps, policy development, public outreach and presentations.  Her city clients include Glendale, Newport Beach, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Moorpark, Brea, Fontana and several cities in the Coachella Valley.  Ms. Gonzalez has also trenched and studied many of the faults in the southern California area, such as the San Jacinto, Whittier, Elsinore, Newport-Inglewood, Hollywood, Raymond, Springville, Simi and San Andreas faults.  Internationally, she managed the field investigation at the damaged Ford Otosan facility in Turkey to study the probability of future earthquake damage after the 1999 Koaceli Earthquake, and she has also studied faults in Central America and Baja California, Mexico.  Ms. Gonzalez is an active member of the Association of Engineering Geologists (AEG), and was the 2002-2004 Chair of the Southern California Section of AEG.

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Dr. Yeats, an Emeritus Professor of Geology at Oregon State University and a senior partner in Earth Consultants International, is a structural and earthquake geologist whose work focuses on three-dimensional investigations of active faults and folds using oil-industry borehole and seismic data, including data from producing oil fields.  His research has led to a new understanding of the source dimensions of the 1971 San Fernando, 1987 Whittier Narrows, and 1994 Northridge earthquakes.  He has been a member of the Southern California Earthquake Center since its inception. He has been funded by the Earthquake External Grants Program of the U.S. Geological Survey since the early 1970s. Dr. Yeats was one of the first to map active faults in the Himalayan plate boundary megathrust. He has also served as consultant advisor to the New Zealand Geological Survey, the State Seismological Bureau of China, and the Geological Survey of Japan. He also led an ECI team to study the March 2002, Nahrin, Afghanistan earthquake in which more than 2000 people lost their lives.

Mr. Ahmad Hussain completed his B.Sc. (with Honors) degree in 1966 from Peshawar University and his M.Sc. (in Petroleum and Structural Geology) in 1968 from the University of the Punjab. He joined the Geological Survey of Pakistan in 1967 as Assistant Director and retired as Deputy Director General in January 2005. Mr. Ahmad Hussain has vast experience in the field of stratigraphy, structure and economic geology. He has over 100 national and international research publications to his credit and has presented 30 research papers in national and international seminars, symposia and conferences. He has carried out a tectonic study of the northern part of Pakistan in collaboration with the U.S. National Science Foundation. He has revised and modified the geology of the Peshawar basin and the Attock-Cherat Range on the basis of stratigraphic, structural and paleontological data. He has geologically mapped about 15,000 square kilometers of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Kashmir, which resulted in the discovery of huge deposits of marble, silica sand, bauxite, salt, cement raw material, lightweight aggregate and iron ore deposits.

Dr. Laton is an expert in the field of hydrology/hydrogeology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Hydrogeology in the Department of Geological Sciences, California State University Fullerton. This is a continuation of a career that includes years of teaching, consulting, litigation, support and management experience.

More recently, Dr. Laton led Earth Consultants International's natural hazards mapping project for Riverside County. In that capacity, he supervised the GIS-based effort to assemble and synthesize the natural hazards of concern to the area, including seismic, flood, fire, landslide, liquefaction, faulting and dam inundation.

Ms. St. Peters, a Project Geologist and a partner in Earth Consultants International, has 24 years of experience in the evaluation of geologic impacts on small to large residential, commercial, and public works projects. She has conducted and supervised all phases of geological and geotechnical investigations including background research, aerial photography interpretation, geologic mapping, exploratory drilling, soil sampling, data analysis, development of mitigation measures, report preparation, and project management. Her experience includes fault hazard studies for schools and residential developments, geologic analysis of large hillside developments, slope stabilization studies, evaluation of unstable foundation soils, landslide investigations and treatment, as well as natural hazard mapping. She has considerable experience on earthwork construction sites, in addition to working with property owners, developers, civil engineers, and public agencies. More recently, she has applied her construction experience to site feasibility and environmental impact studies, assisting design engineers and land planners in the early stages of project development. She has also acquired considerable geotechnical experience with redevelopment projects within southern California's active and abandoned oil fields.

Dr. Gurler has over 15 years of consulting, teaching and research experience in the geophysical field, mainly in earthquake analysis and disaster mitigation techniques for reducing seismic hazards. Her areas of expertise include strong ground motion waveform modeling in three dimensions considering near source and site effects with realistic subsurface layers; variation of peak ground acceleration and velocity at the ground surface; microzonation and seismic hazard mapping; deterministic and probabilistic earthquake analyses; and vulnerability investigation for structures using microtremors for microzonation and land-use planning. She has extensive knowledge of the earthquake hazards in Turkey, Japan, Mexico and Italy, and has managed several projects in these countries. She has conducted field studies for small to large-scale residential, commercial and historical buildings, as well as some essential facilities for hazard mitigation studies in Japan and Turkey. Her skills include the use of a wide range of computer software. She worked in Tokyo, Japan for four years as part of Japan 's disaster mitigation group and is fluent in Turkish and Japanese.

Mr. Madden has seven years of experience locating and characterizing active faults for planning, development and research. He employs state-of-the-art techniques, including remote sensing, digital field mapping, 2-D and 3-D fault trenching, and drilling to help clients understand and mitigate the impact of active faulting to their projects. Mr. Madden has conducted and overseen geotechnical fault investigations for housing, school and dam design along the major faults in southern California, including the San Andreas, San Jacinto, Garlock, Chino, and Elsinore faults. He has also participated in projects to characterize fault hazards for large public infrastructure projects in Europe and Central America. He is an active member of the research community and is involved in studies to characterize the timing, frequency and interaction of earthquakes on major fault systems around the world. His work through ECI, Central Washington University and Oregon State University has produced some of the first data on active fault systems in Panama, Taiwan, Nepal, Portugal, Pakistan and Afghanistan.