Dr. Raymond Seed is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. This past year he led the NSF-sponsored independent investigation team in studying the performance of the levees and flood protection systems in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans represented the single most costly failure of an engineered system in history, and presents numerous important lessons both for engineers as well as for experts and others involved in efforts to prevent major disasters elsewhere.