Samira Mhammadyzadeh started her Ph.D. study in September 2021 in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies Specialized in Timber Engineering. Samira has done her master’s degree in Earthquake Engineering from Tabriz university in Iran and has worked mostly in vibration control devices and dampers, structural control and vibration mitigation, finite element analysis and dynamic behavior of structures, structural health monitoring and damage detection. She developed three innovated dampers during her investigation. Dynamic properties of tall timber building (modeling, testing) would be the area of her focus during the Ph.D. investigation.

This summer, we have three new members joining our group.

Hamidreza Chaboki (Reza) starts his Ph.D. study this May. Reza has an MSc in Structural Engineering from the University of Birjand in Iran. His previous research experience is in reinforced concrete. His Ph.D. study will investigate the optimal design of timber concrete composite floor systems based on their structural and acoustical performance.

Weixian Lan (Kai) just finished her dual degree in both Math and Computer Science at UNBC. She is awarded the UNBC ISRA to develop a mobile application for field testing of mass timber floor vibration performance. The App will enable practicing engineers and designers to perform vibration tests and subjective evaluations of built mass timber floors, which will contribute to a database to support the vibration serviceability design of mass timber floors.

Arindam Mor is finishing his third-year study in Mechanical Engineering at Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in Indian. He is working as a Mitacs Global Intern virtually in our group. His project is to develop a Matlab-based program to post-process floor vibration test data and will explore machine learning for performance criteria pattern recogination.

Congratulations to Geng for receiving the UNBC Undergrad Research Experience award. Geng is currently a second-year environmental engineering student. He has been working in our group since last summer and has shown great interest in real-life problem-solving. With the URE, he will continue working on the project ‘Vibration performance of mechanically laminated timber floors’.