Preetish Kakoty
Student Fellow
Preetish Kakoty is a PhD Candidate at the Engineering for Seismic Resilience Lab in the Civil Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia. His current research focuses on quantifying seismic risk and community resilience for Vancouver’s neighborhoods with a specific focus on tall older buildings and large magnitude earthquakes from the Cascadia subduction zone. He is working with the City of Vancouver to inform the upcoming seismic policy through his research, for which he received the Public Scholar Fellowship at UBC.
Areas of Interest: disaster recovery, risk-informed policy, community resilience
Primary Recipient Awards
The Wall Catalyst Student Fellow cohort will first come together to engage in the online, interdisciplinary Facing Human Wrongs course and subsequently work together on a number of public-facing projects.
The course content touches upon systemic, historical and ongoing violence, unsustainability, our complicities in social and ecological harm, and our tendency to address complex problems, such as biodiversity loss, food insecurity, economic and political crises, and the potential for social and environmental collapse, with simplistic solutions. The course requires students to be willing to be uncomfortable and to have their perspective challenged.
