Mohammad Syed, Kashmiri PhD Student Earns Top Spot In Engineering Competition At Buffalo University.

Mohammad Syed, a PhD candidate from Kashmir has earned the top spot in this year’s Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Department poster competition in Buffalo University.

A candidate in structural engineering from Kashmir, Syed took first prize this year, presenting his research Tessellated Structural-Architectural Systems for Rapid Construction, Repair and Disassembly.

Syed said that this poster introduces a new modular shear wall system designed for replaceability and resilience after extreme loading, as well as architectural appeal.

Syed, who is co-advised by associate professors Negar Elhami-Khorasani and Pinar Okumus, said that the walls are called tessellated structural-architectural walls because they consist of interlocking tiles with repetitive shapes and they satisfy both structural and architectural demands.

He will be presenting this work at The American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Institute’s structures congress this spring and earned the 2021 Structural Engineers Foundation graduate scholarship for his research.

Meanwhile, Professor and head of the department, Joseph F. Atkinson said that the students presented virtually this year and each student had ten minutes to present to faculty judges and spectators. “It was challenging to present that much information in a short amount of time, but our students impressed.”(KNS)