Location

I am currently in graduate school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, pursuing a Professional Masters degree in structural engineering with a focus on risk and reliability in engineering, safeguarding systems from disasters (earthquake, tornado, fire, blast…), and finite element analyses. I will be done with grad school within the year and I seek a volunteer opportunity amongst disaster relief efforts to bring my study of safety in engineering and to bring my passion of service into life. I should be able to take a few weeks on intermission from school with advanced notice and consent from my professors.

It shatters my heart that a significant loss of life upon natural disasters is due to how a building collapses. China for instance lost significant life upon the earthquake in summer 2008 with some buildings not following a building code as some neighboring buildings had; one school had collapsed while a neighboring school had not demonstrating the importance of implementing safety starting in design throughout construction. Haiti suffers great loss with concrete buildings collapsing without proper or any reinforcement; life could have been spared with even some slight safety design considerations. I hope to join a disaster response team to help rebuild a region stricken by destruction and to learn from the failures that occurred within that region in the wake of disasters in order to prevent such destruction from impacting loss of life in such a way ever again.