EERI at UCLA held our first research roundtable this academic year on Thursday, November 10 in Boelter Hall 4275. The roundatble aims at enriching students at UCLA with knowledge on recent advancements in earthquake engineering research. Chris did so by giving a half an hour presentation on his research topic, “Seismic Performance Limitations of Slender Reinforced Concrete Structural Walls”, in a luncheon setting. He started his presentation by first describing the basic seismic design principles, building codes, and shear walls system. Simply put, the shear wall system, constructed by reinforced concrete, acts to resist lateral and vertical loads. It is designed to yield in flexure, max moment at base, where it is called the ductile region or the “plastic hinge. In fact, Chris went over distributed web reinforcement and vertical reinforcement to give a background of his experiment setup for the wall panel test. After giving an overview of his experiments, he drew conclusion for his research and left some time for the audience to ask questions. The presentation was definitely beneficial for all levels of students, and we are having our next roundtable on November 23rd, with a presentation topic on the italian earthquake that happened recently.