“For me, earthquake engineering isn’t just an academic discipline—it’s deeply personal. In 2015, when the Gorkha earthquake devastated my home country of Nepal, I was in my second year as an undergraduate student. Witnessing that destruction firsthand completely changed my path and inspired me to dedicate my career to designing safer, more resilient buildings for communities living in earthquake-prone regions. Today, as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, I am turning that personal mission into reality through cutting-edge research on mass timber structural systems.

Working under the guidance of professor Chris Pantelides, my research focuses on using mass timber buckling-restrained braces as lateral force-resisting systems for multi-story mass timber buildings. My day-to-day work spans the entire testing spectrum, from designing and conducting full-scale experimental testing of 18-foot-long braces in our High Bay lab to developing advanced finite element models that simulate their behavior during seismic activity. Supported by a USDA Wood Innovations Grant aimed at qualifying timber buckling-restrained braces and designing an 18-story braced building, our team is working to evaluate and prove the seismic performance of these sustainable structures.

I recently had the opportunity to present our findings at the 13th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering in Portland, Oregon, sharing insights from our paper, “Mass Timber Buckling Restrained Brace as a LFRS for Mass Timber-Braced Frame,” co-authored with Dr. Pantelides, Hans-Erik Blomgren and Douglas Rammer. Having our work published in a peer-reviewed journal has been an exciting milestone as we demonstrate the growing impact of resilient timber construction. Looking ahead, I plan to pursue a postdoctoral position before stepping into a career as a research scientist. Through performance-based seismic design, my ultimate goal extends beyond advancing engineering knowledge—it is about ensuring that communities like the one I grew up in can stand strong and safe against future earthquakes.”

— Rupesh Uprety, doctoral student, John and Marcia Price College of Engineering