C. Allin Cornell

C. Allin Cornell
C.A. Cornell while at Stanford University
Born	(1938-09-19)19 September 1938 Mobridge, South Dakota, USA
Died	December 14, 2007(2007-12-14) (aged 69)
Residence	Portola Valley, California, USA
Nationality	United States
Fields	Earthquake engineering
Institutions	Stanford University MIT
Alma mater	Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Jack Benjamin
Known for	Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis
Notable awards	Norman Medal (1983,2003) H.F. Reid Medal (2001) G.W. Housner Medal (2003)

C. (Carl) Allin Cornell (September 19, 1938 – December 14, 2007) was a civil engineer, a researcher, and a professor who made important contributions to reliability theory and earthquake engineering and, along with Dr. Luis Esteva, developed the field of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis in 1968.

Cornell was born in Mobridge, South Dakota in 1938. He received his A.B. in architecture in 1960 and M.S. and Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1961 and 1964 respectively, all at Stanford University. He held a professorship at the MIT from 1964 to 1983, and in 1983 became a Research Professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Moisseiff Award (1977), two Norman Medals (1983, 2003), and the Fruedenthal Medal (1988) from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He also received the Harry Fielding Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America (SSA) in 2001, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Housner Medal in 2003. He was a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2002) and Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1981). His wife is Dr. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, currently (2009) chair of Stanford’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, and one of his five children is Eric Allin Cornell Nobel Laureate in Physics.

He is best known for his 1968 seminal paper "Engineering Seismic Risk Analysis" that started the field of Probabilistic Seismic Hazard analysis (PSHA), his work in reliability especially on second-moment methods and reliability-based code calibration, and his development of the probabilistic framework for performance-based earthquake engineering that became the unifying equation of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center. His 1971 book, Probability, Statistics, and Decision for Civil Engineers (coauthored with Jack Benjamin), exposed an entire generation of civil and structural engineering students to the field of probabilistic modeling and decision analysis, and remains a standard reference for students and researchers to this day.