In addition to the appointment of Satinder Kaur Brar as the James & Joanne Love Chair in Environmental Engineering, the Lassonde School of Engineering welcomes three new faculty members to the departments of Civil Engineering and Earth & Space Science & Engineering: Liam Butler, Ryan Orszulik and Shooka Karimpour.
Liam Butler
Liam Butler
Liam Butler joins Lassonde as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering. Butler earned his PhD from the University of Waterloo for his research work involving recycling of old concrete structures into new concrete, which combined materials, structural experimental testing and statistical analysis.
His research interests are centred on the development, investigation and implementation of sustainable and intelligent structures and material systems. In addition, experiential teaching (and learning) has always been a focal point of his academic career.
Prior to joining the Lassonde School of Engineering, Butler was a research associate working at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction (CSIC) at the University of Cambridge and a cross-appointed group leader within the Lloyd's Register Foundation program on data-centric engineering at the Alan Turing Institute.
Ryan Orszulik
Ryan Orszulik
Ryan Orszulik joins Lassonde as an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Space Science & Engineering. Orszulik earned his BASc in space engineering and his PhD from the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University, after which he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Mechanics at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg from 2014-16.
Since December 2016, Orszulik has been an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab with a joint appointment between the John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
The core theme of his research is to exploit the vast potential of smart materials, particularly piezoelectrics and shape memory alloys, in applications from instrumentation to structures. He is interested in the intelligent design of robotic and mechatronic systems through the development of dynamic models, the discovery of new fabrication techniques and the use of advanced control.
Shooka Karimpour
Shooka Karimpour
Shooka Karimpour joins Lassonde as an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering. Karimpour is a civil engineer with more than 16 years of experience in academia and industry, with expertise in environmental hydrodynamics.
She specializes in the development and refinement of hydro-environmental models to investigate mixing processes, fate and transport of mass and momentum, and energy distribution in surface water bodies.
Karimpour earned her BSc and MSc from AmirKabir University of Technology in Tehran, where she practised as an engineer in watershed planning and hydraulic design for six years before starting her PhD at McGill University. During her PhD research, she worked on the optimization, adoption and application of 2D numerical schemes in compressible flow for shallow waters.
Upon graduation, she worked as a postdoctoral Fellow studying the vortex shedding and flow oscillations in the Saint Lawrence River, in a collaboration between McGill University and industry. She then joined CIRAIG to work on a multidisciplinary project in life cycle assessment, focusing on the impact of water flow and dynamic in water footprint assessment.
Prior to joining the Lassonde School of Engineering, Karimpour also served as a consultant on some of the biggest ongoing hydraulic infrastructure projects in the province of Quebec.