Dr. Peter Datin will lead a panel discussion on wind engineering practice. The purpose of this panel discussion is to provide current graduate students in wind engineering with knowledge of different types of employment opportunities outside of academia for wind engineering professionals with advanced degrees. The panelists (all PhD wind engineers) will discuss their experiences in being recruited for their current jobs as well as the types of projects they work on and how their unique skill set has helped them in their careers. During the session, conference attendees are encouraged to ask questions of the panelists.

Dr. Peter Datin has been with RMS for 10 years. As a Senior Director of Modeling, he leads the climate vulnerability group overseeing hurricane and other windstorms, convective storm, winterstorm, and flood vulnerability development in North America and the Caribbean, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions. He has been the lead vulnerability developer for the North Atlantic Hurricane and the North American Severe Convective Storm models. Recently, he has been heavily involved in the Japan Typhoon model. The RMS models are used to estimate damage and losses to the built environment for all types of natural hazards and are used primarily in the insurance industry. In addition to vulnerability development, Peter has led multiple field reconnaissance teams to assess hurricane and tornado damage in the US and Caribbean. Prior to joining RMS in 2011, Peter received his PhD in civil (structural/wind) engineering from the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he researched structural load paths in wood-frame structures and worked on structural testing under simulated wind loads of various building components and materials. He has also worked as a part-time lecturer at Stanford University where he developed and taught a wind engineering course. He serves on the board of directors for the American Association of Wind Engineering and is involved with the American Society of Civil Engineers serving on the Tornado Wind Speed Estimation Committee.

Dr. Maryam Asghari Mooneghi has a broad and multidisciplinary background with more than 10 years of research experience in structural engineering. She has performed cutting-edge research in experimental and computational wind engineering and performance-based seismic analysis and design of buildings and bridges. She has expertise in computational solid and fluid mechanics and has developed robust numerical methods leveraging cutting-edge computational mechanics theories. She received her PhD and M.Sc. degrees in Structural/Wind Engineering from Florida International University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Aerospace-Structural Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology. During her PhD, she performed research at the Wall of Wind facility which is one of the nation’s major Experimental Facilities under the NSF’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program, and one of only two for wind hazard research. She developed a novel experimental-computational simulation methodology for enabling large-scale wind tunnel testing aimed towards achieving wind-hazard resilient structures. Her research has led to development and improvement of codes and standards including ASCE7, ASCE49 and ANSI/SPRI-RP4. She is a part-time lecturer with the Civil Engineering Department at California State University at Sacramento where she teaches structural engineering courses. As a member of the NHERI Science Plan Committee Dr. Asghari Mooneghi keeps abreast of emerging key research areas in natural hazards engineering. She serves the Structural Wind Engineering Committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). As a senior structural engineer with AECOM she is currently working on all aspects of analysis and design of transportation structures (mainly bridges) located in areas with high seismicity. Prior to joining AECOM, she was a structural analyst with the Advanced Technology and Research team in Arup and was involved in multiple high-end projects on the performance-based seismic analysis and retrofit of structures as well as computational simulation of wind loads on the built environment. She is a licensed professional engineer in California.

Viet Le is a Graduate Engineer in Arup’s Advanced Technology and Research (AT+R) team in New York. Specializing in microclimate and wind hazard analysis, he has worked on a variety of projects applying advanced computational methods to solve environmental and wind engineering challenges. He graduated from Northeastern University with his PhD in Civil Engineering in May 2020 with a focus on applying performance-based wind engineering methods to the analysis of thunderstorms and tornadoes. Prior to Northeastern, he received his MS and BS from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2016 and 2015 respectively