Research Interests
- Structural resilience against extreme hazards: earthquake, fire safety, and blast engineering.
- Conjunction of structural resilience and sustainability.
- Risk assessment, uncertainty modeling, and reliability analyses for performance-based design.
Current Grants
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant (PI): “Performance-Based Design of Multi-Story Timber-Steel Hybrid Structures under Extreme Hazards.” $132,500 (2022)
MITACS Accelerate Entrepreneur Post-Doctoral Program (Lead Academic Supervisor): “Development of a Smart Wall Damper for High-Rise Buildings Subjected to Extreme Lateral Loads.” $120,000 (2022)
British Columbia Forestry Innovation Investment Wood First framework (PI): “Post-Earthquake Fire Performance of Tall Mass Timber Buildings.” $35,578 (2022)
Research Projects
Active Projects:
- Uncertainty quantification in elevated temperature properties of engineered wood products: Structural risk assessment against fire requires robust material models that take into account the uncertainty in material behavior over a range of elevated temperatures. Such material models can directly inform design procedures for building fire safety.
- Fire performance of mass-timber connections
- Hazard characterization for hybrid timber-steel structures: Earthquakes, fires and fire following earthquakes: While seismic hazard characterization is an established field, the same is not true for fire scenarios. This research focuses on integrating knowledge from earthquake, fire, and structural engineering in a comprehensive performance-based framework in order to establish integrated scenarios for multiple hazards while considering their likelihood.
- Multi-hazard damage assessment of hybrid timber-steel structures: Ensuring resiliency of structures requires performance objectives beyond life safety, including continuation of business (less downtime, return of functionality of the structure through quick recovery, etc.). It is therefore necessary to link structural performance to quantified levels of damage.
- Post-earthquake fire performance of tall mass timber buildings: Currently, very limited knowledge is available on the fire performance of tall mass timber structures. Even less research is available on the behavior of mass timber structures after having sustained significant damage from seismic shaking. This research project aims to increase the public acceptance of tall-timber construction acceptance in earthquake-prone regions.