"I really like the research aspect in my field. Being on the cutting edge is appealing to me."
Dan was interested in architecture in high school; however, his math and science aptitude carried him into engineering at the start of college and he never wavered. The new earthquake engineering lab was a big inducement to stay at UB for graduate work—there just isn't anything better anywhere else. He will write a master's thesis in performance-based earthquake engineering for mission-critical facilities—such as hospitals, nuclear plants, and off-shore drilling platforms—that absolutely must survive an earthquake in functioning condition. Specifically, he will be looking at a component of an isolation bearing, testing, modeling, and predicting its behavior using simple equations. He knows the bearing because the research is a continuation of an undergraduate research experience that persuaded him to join the graduate program in the first place.
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Dan Fenz