Board Member Emeritus
David Friedman recently retired after more than 45 years of professional practice in structural and earthquake engineering. He spent more than 40 of these years at Forell/Elsesser Engineers, where he was a Senior Principal and Chair of the Board of Directors, not to mention immediate past President and CEO. His strength, gained over the breadth and depth of his career, is a holistic perspective of a projects’ planning, design and construction and the collaborative integration of creative structural solutions with architects, engineers and builders.
With a specialty in seismic engineering and retrofitting of existing structures, particularly those with historic designation, David solved numerous structural and earthquake engineering challenges during his career. Principal examples of his projects include the base isolation retrofits of San Francisco City Hall and the Asian Art Museum, the adaptive reuse and retrofit for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the seismic safety corrections and remodeling of UC Berkeley’s California Memorial Stadium. David is devoted to world-wide seismic risk reduction and is an immediate-past director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, dedicated to learning and disseminating the lessons learned from earthquakes around the world. He is also deeply involved in many civic, philanthropic and not-for-profit Boards including The San Francisco Foundation, SPUR, UC Berkeley Foundation and the Jewish Home of San Francisco.