Amr Ghanem · Biography

About

A structural engineer in Honolulu, designing buildings and bridges at Martin, Chock & Carden and researching multi-hazard vulnerability at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. The two run at the same time, and have since 2023 — not one after the other. Practice sets the questions the research is worth asking; the research decides what practice can be confident about.

The route here started at Cairo University: civil engineering, finished with honours in 2016, then a master’s in 2019 on the seismic behaviour of eccentrically braced steel frames. Running alongside it were three years at a Cairo consultancy — steel structures designed to AISC and Eurocode, value engineering to take material out without taking safety with it, and BIM coordination across design, change management and risk. The doctorate brought the move to Hawaiʻi in 2019.

Hawaiʻi changed the question. Seismic and tsunami demand here is not an abstraction to be checked once at the end; it is the constraint a design is organised around from the first sketch. The research came out of that setting, and goes back into it.

The practice work is buildings and bridges from the foundations up — load capacity, structural behaviour, and the drawings that carry a design into construction. It is also the structures already standing: site visits, and condition assessments that set down what was found, why it happened, and what it will take to put right. And it is staying with a design while it is built, through shop drawing review and the questions that come back from the field.

The research is Locus, a multi-hazard assessment tool. The hazard enters as an input rather than a built-in assumption, so it can be varied alongside the structural parameters. The answer is a surface rather than a curve, and a resilience index rather than a pass or a fail — which is what turns a set of probabilities into a retrofit priority.

Teaching has meant 155 undergraduates as instructor of record in Mechanics of Solids and its laboratory, and graduate and undergraduate researchers mentored in the structures lab.

Two of the ideas left the lab. Model-C, infrastructure simulation and optimisation technology, took first in the UH Breakthrough Innovation Challenge in 2021; Resesio, an automated optimisation model for the construction design process, took second in the UH Venture Competition in 2022.

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