During June 5-11, 2019, four Chula Engineering faculty members, including Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anat Ruangrassamee (Department of Civil Engineering), Asst. Prof. Dr. Chatpan Chintanapakdee (Department of Civil Engineering), Dr. Piyatida Ruangrassamee (Department of Water Resources Engineering), and Dr. Natt Leelawat (Department of Industrial Engineering), gave lectures in the Risk and Disaster Management Program of Graduate School, Chulalongkorn University’s co-organized workshop, “the 2nd PREEMPTIVE Advanced Studies Institute: Thailand”. It is the series of the multidisciplinary workshop supported by the US National Science Foundation.

The theme of the workshop was about tsunami disaster. The participants are the graduate and undergraduate students from USA and Thailand, including Chulalongkorn University, Kasem Bundit University, The University of Connecticut, Southern California University, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, University of Rhode Island, etc.

The first day of the event was done at Kasem Bundit University, Bangkok. Four faculty members of Chula Engineering gave lectures on the Day1.

Asst. Prof. Dr. Chatpan Chintanapakdee gave a lecture on “Earthquake Disaster and Preparedness in Thailand.” Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anat Ruangrassamee gave a lecture on “Tsunami Disaster and Mitigation.” Dr. Natt Leelawat presented “Disaster Management.” Lastly, Dr. Piyatida Ruangrassamee presented “Flood and Water Security.”

The goal of this workshop is to practice preparing the research proposal between Thai and US students. The participants also went to Phuket to visit the real sites in order to observe the current situation. They visited the sites such as Tsunami Memorial Monument, Evacuation Shelter, T. 813 Monument, and Tsunami Memorial Museum at Phang Nha Province.

The group then came back to Bangkok and continued their discussion using the iScale Classroom at Chula Engineering to do group brainstorm and propose new tsunami risk reduction project to the faculty members from Thailand and the USA.

It has been a great work and experience from both Thailand and the USA to apply different background and knowledge and came out with a new idea.