 Welcome to this episode of the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. A podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up to date on technical trends in the field and also help them to succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilti's North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering from UT Austin. I'm your co-host Matt Bacartal. I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers, practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's degree in structural engineering from UC San Diego. Before we introduce our guests, we'd like to let you know that the Engineering Management Institute recently launched another podcast, the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, which can be found at geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. This podcast will be focused on helping geotechnical engineers stay up to date with the latest technical trends in the field. The host is award-winning geotechnical leader Jared Green, a licensed professional engineer who's been practicing as a geotechnical engineer for 20 years. You can find all of the episodes on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. And you can request guest topics and ideas at geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. In this episode, we talk to Antonio Zaldivar de Alba, a teacher and research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He'll be talking about wind engineering and provide our listeners with three great benefits that they can get by joining ASCE's Structural Engineering Institute, or SEI. He believes that we, structural engineering professionals, should seek innovative solutions to make infrastructure safer and more resilient. Now, let's jump into our conversation with Antonio. Antonio, welcome to the Structural Engineering Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So I understand that you are a teacher and a research assistant at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. What subjects are you teaching there and what is it that you research? Yeah, so my teaching assistant responsibilities actually are mainly grading and holding office hours. I do teach sometimes when the professor is not available, he either travels for a conference or has some meetings. That's when I step up and teach. I have been a teaching assistant, sorry, for a steel structures one that is basically an undergrad course where the students learn the basics of structural design of steel members. Basically, we teach them how to design steel members for steel by tension, flexure, compression, and then we end with a combination of loading. Basically, compression and flexure or tension and flexure. And that's what we cover in the steel structures one. Also, I have experienced being a teaching assistant of wind engineering that it's basically my area of research. And this course was actually developed by my advisor, Professor Franklin Bardot at the University of Illinois. And this is mainly an introduction of the basics of wind engineering. Additionally to that, this last spring, I was the teaching assistant for the structural engineering seminar series at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And this course, we just invite distinguished structural engineering speakers from both the academia and the industry to come over to the University of Illinois and give a talk to our student body. And basically my main responsibility in this course is just making announcements and making sure that everything runs smoothly and making sure the presentation is set when the speaker has water and basically not teaching responsibilities. And regarding my research assistant job, I've been working with Professor Franklin Bardot for now, I think three and a half years. And I have been involved in several research projects, but now what I'm working on is actually on the development of novel wind engineering instruments to capture information from extreme wind events. And actually this project was recently funded by NIST as part of the disaster resilience grant. So yeah, this is basically what my teaching assistants and research assistants responsibilities involve at the University of Illinois. Awesome. Could you go into wind engineering? So as, you know, for me working in engineering, I kind of see like the research or the effects of your research, you know, like the wind loads, but could you go into wind engineering? I guess one on one for people that aren't too familiar, particularly in wind engineering and how all those things come into play. For sure. For sure. Actually, yeah, wind engineering will always have kind of the trouble of being related with only wind energy. Obviously, that's not true for structural engineers because you deal with the AC7 wind load. So you know that this wind also loads structures, but really a wind engineering kind of the dictionary definition. It's a discipline concerned with the effects of the wind on the natural environment, so both the natural and built. And as you can guess from this definition, it's a truly diverse subject that requires knowledge in many different fields or disciplines. And just to give you an example for my research, I need to know a little bit about fluid mechanics, statistics, meteorology, signal processing, and obviously structural engineering. But we also deal like, especially with loads in buildings. And even within that specifically of buildings loads for wind, there are specific areas of research such as bridge loading that is completely different. How do you manage a bridge? How do you design a bridge for wind? And how do you design a low-rise building, for example, where the load is more static, right? And also, when you have a high-rise building, where you have issues of vortex shedding and some types of vortex that can generate. And usually the natural frequency of the high-rise buildings stay more or less within the bounds that can be really affected by wind. So usually the taller you go, the more important wind is for your structure. Again, we deal with many different things. Another research area in the wind engineering field is obviously wind energy. But also we deal with pedestrian comfort for urban areas, some pollutant dispersion, and obviously wind loading of buildings. And yeah, so it's a extremely diverse field. I just want to highlight that there are many different fields within the wind engineering field. Sounds really diverse, but can you tell me, where is it that is really your area of focus or what has brought you to be so passionate about wind engineering? So actually I became passionate about wind engineering thanks to Professor Frank Lombardo, that he's an assistant professor at the University of Brignoine. I started doing research with him on thunderstorm loading. So my main research is on how thunderstorm winds affect different structures because they have different characteristics as the normal wind that we design for. And yeah, that's how I became passionate about wind engineering. I started to look at the loads in low-rise buildings using real actual data. And you can see the random nature, not only of the wind, but also the pressures. And you deal with the statistics, extreme value analysis, and many other tools that you need in order to kind of do this research, right? Yes. So I find that really interesting because I'm also, I guess, I mean, I grew up in Texas and I'm from mainland, like, internal Texas, Central Texas. And I've never really been concerned about hurricane winds by any means, but I have seen a fair share of a good Midwestern thunderstorm. And I've always, I grew up kind of curious about how that affected buildings. You know, is there something from your past that got you interested specifically in thunderstorms, thunderstorm winds? Actually, no, not really. I was just mainly doing my master's degree at the University of Illinois. I was planning on doing a professional master's that is only coursework. And then at the University of Illinois, you have the opportunity to do independent research as part of your coursework. So these independent research entails that you just contact a professor and you, instead of a course, you actually do research in his area. And kind of, it's like a course slash research where you kind of go a little deeper into the research area. And then I started doing that like a spot of my coursework. And I say, okay, I really like this, like, I really like what I'm doing. I'm solving like challenging problems. Well, we're trying to solve them, right? Because that's no research goal. Sometimes you don't quite find the answer. But yeah, that's what got me interested. And then I started working more. And I always loved structural engineering as a kid because my dad is a structural engineer. So, kind of, that was my path towards wind engineering, kind of love structural engineering. And then met Professor Franklin Bardot. And then he kind of, I leaned towards wind engineering with him because I enjoyed working with him. And the topic that I was working was super interesting to me. Sometimes it's good to have a mentor that kind of pulls you along to a specific path. That's, that's really fascinating. And so just final to wrap up this, this topic of thunderstorm winds. What role do you see that thunderstorm winds plays in structural engineering design? Yeah, so actually that's a topic of current research. And for example, currently in a C7 design wind speeds, taking to consideration to understand winds. What do I mean this when you see the map and a C7 and you see the same wind speeds for different levels of or different return periods. And these are these wind speeds already considering that the thunderstorm winds come from a different distribution that normal winds. So because thunderstorm winds are generated from storms, they follow a different distribution than the what we call like normal winds, atmospheric boundary layer winds, the ones that we design. So this is already taken into consideration. You, what actually you do is you develop two different extreme value distributions. And then you take the one that it's controlling and actually in most in a lot of parts of the US, the thunderstorm winds are the one that control the design wind speeds for long return periods. So now that we're actually designing for wind speeds that we're able to reach using with thunderstorms. And the thing is that we don't know how to design for them because these twins have different characteristics as normal winds. The winds that we designed for will usually use an atmospheric boundary layer, boundary layer wind tunnel, sorry, a boundary layer wind tunnel that the objective of this tunnel is to simulate the atmospheric boundary layer. And what's the atmospheric boundary layer basically you have that the wind speed increases with height. So you have lower wind speed closer to the ground and higher wind speeds over. But this doesn't happen in many cases in doing thunderstorm winds. Sometimes during thunderstorm winds you can have the highest wind speeds, a little bit closer to the ground like for example in the other meters. So this is a fundamental fundamentally different from like the normal wind that we designed for. And other difference are like in thunderstorm winds sometimes you can have a vertical component, because you know sometimes you have these storms called numbers that impact the ground. And then you generate these vertices that can generate a vertical component of the wind, which has been shown to be important for the roof pressures or sections. So yeah, they are fundamentally different. And the thing is, okay, we are considering the wind speeds from thunderstorms already in the design wind speeds. But really in the low part, we don't know how these thunderstorm winds flow the structure differently. And that's kind of part of my research how if they do, right, we are trying to assess the difference between thunderstorm winds and normal winds. The ones that already have everything in the design, we have a one layer wind tunnels to design for this type of winds. But I'm really looking if there are some differences with thunderstorm winds. In your assessment of these differences between the two types of wind, how is it that you're collecting information about how these winds act and then how are you modeling it when you're doing different types of research. Yeah, so there are different research actually approach to this thunderstorm wind loading. One is using CFD simulations that basically use fluid mechanics equations and to simulate the numbers and how it affects the structures. And the second one is actually using modified wind tunnels where they actually try to simulate better the characteristics of thunderstorms such that they add some additional things to the boundary layer wind tunnel in order to replicate some of the characteristics of thunderstorm winds. And then they get data using a model of the building. And what I'm trying to do is actually get actual data from full scale events in order to actually validate the CFD and wind tunnel methods because as of now, they're really few studies that have where that we actually have full scale data from thunderstorm winds. It's really challenging because thunderstorm winds, as you can imagine, they are locally, they're especially and temporarily small. So they happen in a matter of like minutes and they are not as big as an atmospheric boundary layer event where you have several kilometers of highways. And that's why at the University of Illinois we're developing some new instrumentation that is fully mobile such that we can have a higher probability of capturing these types of events. Yeah, so my approach is basically getting full scale data of loading and wind characteristics of these events such that we can actually validate what we're doing with CFD and wind tunnels. Probably not solving everything but kind of have a benchmark test or something like that kind of provide that a data set that people can relate to when they want to validate their models. Okay, so it looks like so it's so in wind tunnels and the way that we usually design per code that usually just takes into account like high winds, but thunderstorms they basically behave differently right and so that's it looks like that's what you're kind of trying to figure out how do these thunderstorms behave how do they affect the loading. And even in a wind tunnel, that's not how thunderstorm behaves you're trying to find ways in your research through instrumentation to try to find out how to best simulate thunderstorm, thunderstorm wind conditions and even in the wind tunnel right. Correct. Could you go into kind of what the, what the instrumentation looks like that seems pretty interesting like how are you guys capturing that data is it. What do you have a truck that records the wind speeds or yeah how you guys even trying to do that like what's the process. This is part of the, obviously this is led by Professor Franklin Bardot at the Wind Engineering Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. And we're basically working now into novel instruments that can capture this extremely. The first one is a portable loading cube. And the second one is a strain based anemometer. So talking about the first one the portable loading cube. It's a four foot cube that it's able to capture pressure in 126 points throughout the cube. So that would be distributed symmetrically throughout the cube. And it's pretty small cube right it's not the size of a rice building it's a but the objective of this cube is to be fully mobile actually you can put it in a truck and just right with it and it runs on batteries. You can deploy it and then it runs by itself you don't need to connect it to power. And yeah it's fast also really fast to deploy like we can deploy it in less than 30 minutes. And this is in order to be able to put it in the spot what we think that the likelihood of the wind of high winds is higher or actually understand when it's higher. So we need to deploy it fast and it has to be fully mobile because you don't have it runs in batteries. And actually now we're just finishing an article that we plan to submit to the journal when you need an industrial aerodynamics where we prove the validity of this portable loading cube meaning that a okay it's a four foot cube right. But what we're what we're proving here is that this a block body that it's small cube actually behaves as a larger full-scale low rise building kind of in the order of a three meters to 18.3 meters. Sorry for the SI units there. So 10 feet to 50 feet. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. So that we're trying to prove that this actually although it's not the same height it can behave as a full scale so therefore we can get valuable data using this cube and that's the first part of this instrumentation. So for sorry for that one. You're saying mobile so does that mean you take that modeling that that cube model and go into a thunderstorm. Yeah. So you're like a storm chaser like Twitter. Chasing thunderstorms. Yeah. Yeah we'd like to capture thunderstorms. Obviously we have a the professor has a lot of experience. He used to chase tornadoes. Yeah. Yeah. His research. So and we also have a obviously within the safety of research right we're not chasing tornadoes for this. We're trying to understand. And because we try to have your high winds and also we try to be fast level and also the cube has some hours like five hours of data collection. So it's not that we're putting the cube and next 40 minutes. The high winds are going to come we have some leeway to work to work such that everybody's perfectly safe and nothing happens right and we also have a knowing part of the research team. And we also have Zach Whitehoff from he did his masters in atmospheric sciences and he now switched to master in structural engineering. He finished his atmospheric science masters and now he he switched gears to a structural union and he knows way too much about a storm. So he's kind of the lead what that tells us where to go and what is the best spot to be. Indeed we're trying to capture these events we need to to be close to them. Very interesting. I think I take the thunderstorm over the tornado any day. Yeah, I'm sorry. And the second part of the instrumentation is just a strain based on a monitor. Actually this is being developed by all of my colleagues. His name is Justin Neville. And this is just a perforated sphere in a sitting on a steel rod. Basically the perforated sphere says serves as the drug element basically what it's receiving the wind force and then they still roll is the one that measures serves as the sensing element that is measuring the strain and then by doing just about calculation. You can relate the force, the rod to the to the wind speed. And what he's, he's, this is completely developed by, by him. So I don't know much about that. I know the basics. And that's dangerous, right. That is very interesting. And I love that you mentioned that you, you know, you depend on these other colleagues. I imagine they're in like a meteorology department. Actually, yeah, suck is wasn't a meteorology. He was actually doing a PhD in meteorology, but he switched gears to a structural engineering. When he met also Professor Franklin Barber. So I think he's enjoying a lot of the group and he has a lot of experience in atmospheric sciences, but he's doing now. I'm not sitting in structural engineering. And yeah, we have a lot of different expertise within the group. We are now six, six people in the group. We have more people to lean towards the wind speed estimation, some of us more leaning towards loading structures. And we have a really nice group. Really a lot of, as you can see, because to deploy this instrument, you need a group of people that's able to go and actually deploy. So collaboration within the group is amazing. You need to have a really good group of researchers and actually they become friends, friends, really good friends. That's awesome. That's very interesting. Well, it's so it's so great. I think there's a lot of structural engineers who maybe feel like they're in structural engineering bubble because we don't have the exposure to work with people from different backgrounds, academically. And so I think it's really cool that you get the opportunity to work with an atmospheric scientist and someone who has a background in meteorology. That's really unique. And I think that's one of the benefits of maybe going back into an academic setting for those who are considering doing so. I think that's one of the clear benefits is having that breadth of exposure to so many different backgrounds that helps you be a better engineer and a better researcher because you get that exposure. And you understand some of the issues that they deal with that they may be completely different what you are dealing with. So maybe they get some data that it's important for them that it's not that important for us and we're not getting some data that is important for them. So it's kind of once you start talking, you realize that we could do a lot of collaboration together and get actually data that matters for both of us. Any examples of that? Yeah, for example, we're mostly interested in the wind, wind high frequency content. And for some of the fluxes research, they only, we have a professor that is doing some flux research in the University of Illinois. And actually we were planning using his tower, but at the beginning they had the set up of not recording the high frequency content of wind, which are we're interested in. They were basically recording, I think, I mean, by minutes, wind speed, so which is not, it's useful for us, but not as useful for our research. So that's kind of when you start talking, you realize, okay, maybe we can store more data for your research that will be able to help you more in your research and that type of stuff. It's kind of helpful. Okay, that's something I think a lot of our audience can can relate to is you're all trying to, you, everybody in the same project has their own objectives and you have to make sure everybody gets what they need out of this out of the situations so that's awesome. The academics isn't so different to practice. Either way, you're going to be working in teams and yeah, it's everyone has their own goals, but then you guys need each other to reach your goals, but being aware of what the other team needs in terms of what their goals are. Yeah, I think it's absolutely comforting. Comforting, because yeah, once you're doing a PhD, one of your worries is that you're missing a lot because I don't have any experience, for example, I have really few experience working in the professional. So I always feel like all my colleagues that are already graduating from master, they're already moving up in the industry and I'm still in the same place. But yeah, it's kind of comforting, so thank you. I love it. Okay, wonderful. So, Antonio, we're going to do a really quick pivot. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise about wind engineering and thunderstorm winds and all these crazy instruments that you're getting to work with. I want to pivot to an article that you wrote for ASCE structural engineering Institute or SEI about why engineering students should join SEI. From what we understand, there are three main benefits that you believe everyone can enjoy when they join SEI. The first one is free membership and scholarship. Can you explain what this means to our listeners and why is that important? Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, actually, I wrote that article because I wanted grad students to realize the great things SEI has to offer. You know, like sometimes in grad school you just come to coursework and you just leave, right? But as you can imagine, being a grad student is a constant struggle for money. So yeah, it's not that easy to get money. So the fact that SEI student membership is for free, I think it's a huge deal for grad students. And most of them don't know, don't even know that they, because they're just like, even from undergrad, I have had this experience where the ASCE chapter charges them some membership like $10 or $20 just to raise funds for their chapter in whatever they went to undergrad. And they come to the University of Illinois and then they just think that SEI also costs some money to join. But thanks to the support that we have at the University of Illinois, our grad student chapter of SEI, we just allow every structural engineering student to join without any fees because we have that support from the faculty of the structural engineering group. But also, even if you don't want to join the grad student chapter, SEI membership is for free, which is, I think, huge because you don't have to spend any money that you already don't have it much. And they give you a magazine and obviously all the benefits of being an SEI member. You get a monthly magazine, the structural magazine, which is has great articles, you can just read and get getting more starting to get involved with the practice and what actually is happening in the structural engineering world. And also you have this discounting webinar conference and the possibility to apply to scholarships, which is actually, I think really important. Because I was lucky enough to get and honored enough to get the SEI OH among research fellowships. That is one of the fellowships that SEI and ASCE give to students. And this was a huge support for me, especially now in the end of my PhD. That allows me to concentrate on my research project. And also it's open for every SEI student member. And scholarships to go to the structure conference. So really by just for free. And really you don't have to pay much, nothing at all. Sorry. And you get all these benefits that really I don't see any reason why not to join and start to be more involved in the structural engineering community as a student. Could you go into. I know that's a great point because I know as a student. A lot of students don't know that there's scholarships, it's free money, for the most part, and especially if you're doing research or getting more into it. Looking for as much scholarships as you can that's something that I wish I would have done it would have saved me a lot of money I was like oh man I could have had a couple thousand dollars here and there if I would just applied. So being in these membership organizations, all these organizations want to give you money but sometimes you just don't have enough applicants to give it away so it's, it's a great opportunity to get scholarships. And you mentioned structures Congress and I think that's your second point in the article could you go into what the benefits of students going to the structures Congress is or for, or for what you meant by that point. Definitely, I've been to structure to structures conference acting twice already. And I think it's an amazing experience, especially for students because, first, obviously you get whatever, whatever it gets right great presentations and get like networking opportunities that just by the fact of going to a structure specifically for students. I think they, they also have a lot of activities that kind of help you get get started to get involved in this in the community, such as a band I don't know if you're familiar with meet the leaders event that it's a kind of a breakfast that it's I think it's great event I have attended all times that I've been. And you, in that, in that event you get to sit with a really well known kind of leaders of the structural engineering field. And you're just a student and you, you get to meet them, ask them questions, just interact with them and see what their thoughts are. And that is a great opportunity that people sometimes are not familiar with that by attending the structure Congress you can, you can do this part of or actually interact. They facilitate interaction with other professionals because you say like, okay, yeah, I'm going to the Congress but maybe I'm not sure if I'm going to approach like, you know, somebody because I don't know, like I don't want to bother them, but ACI creates this kind of opportunity where they encourage interaction. So it's easier even for like introverts or to just talk and meet people and start that conversation. And once you start, you realize that it's not that hard, you know, we're all human, we all make mistakes. And I think ACI that has a great, great part of that. Another part that they have a specific for the students is the career fair. I think it's mostly at the end of the Congress or they have several companies that are looking to hire and then the students can go and just have the resume and talk to the recruits, recruiters, sorry. And obviously that's an opportunity that you don't never want to miss as an as an student. You know, if you're looking for job, they just go to structure Congress, probably you can meet people while in the Congress and then they go to the career fair and take advantage of that. And another thing that it's a lot of fun, not specifically towards students, but it's the student party that it's usually hosted by CSI, which I think it's a great way of meeting people and it's a lot of fun. And it's always, I don't know, these interactions that really we need, we need to grow our network and actually, yeah, just find resources and everything I think just is great and ACI provides a great kind of setup for this. I couldn't agree any more with you. I'm a huge, I'm like the cheerleader for structures Congress. I absolutely love it. This upcoming May or March will be my fourth structures Congress. I love the event. And I think he made such a good point in that whether you're a new structural engineering student, whether you want to go into practice or stay in academia, whether you find yourself to be an extrovert who is ambitious and wants to meet people and network or if you're an introvert and you're just there to learn. There are so many different things so many benefits to going. Of course, number one is that there's the opportunity to learn from other engineers and no one goes into engineering and expects that you leave school and knows know everything right like we always were continuously learning. That's why we have PDH is continuing education credits is because we should always be interested to know what's the newest research. What are the newest trends. What are the best design practices. And I think the other exciting thing is that if you do intend to stay in academia. Getting your foot in the door by meeting with different researchers at structures Congress actually gives you a better leg up if in the future you want to submit an abstract to present yourself which is such a validating accreditation to have to your name to say yeah I presented a structures Congress my research and it can provide you more opportunities down the way if that's the case. I also I think the amount of opportunities they make specifically for younger engineers are by far and the way better and stronger than any other conference they've been to. And I also if our listeners are tuning in and remember and Ellis from a few episodes back and is and is like my dream career for an engineer when I and I met her at the younger younger members meet the leaders breakfast and whether or not you want to be them or you just want to learn from them. I kind of think of this as like a little mini masterclass for those younger engineers who are interested in meeting the experts. I mean if anyone's watched a masterclass. You can listen to Bob Iger who was the CEO of Disney tell you all about the way he sets up his routine and his career and you get a one on one personal interaction with the Bob Igers of structural engineering and I had the opportunity to meet and there. And since since that since that meeting I mean she's been a champion for me she's brought me into different committees she's gotten me different opportunities because she saw where my ambitions line and and she had the ability and the connections to make it happen so it is so critical that you don't just show up. You take part in all of those different opportunities to interact because they're they're really. It's a catalyst to getting you to the next level or or getting you to the next opportunity that you you think you want to participate in so I couldn't agree more. Wonderful. The last and third item that you wanted to share with everybody. That benefit is the graduate student chapters leadership council. I have no idea what that is. Can you tell us what what is that benefit and what's the benefit of being part of this kind of a council. What is it. Yes. Actually this is for me extremely important point. Actually is the for me is the most important because first of all to get the to get to be part of the graduate student chapter leadership council. You first have to be part of the graduate student chapter. So I see I now has a we currently have 18 universities that have a CI graduate student chapters in the US. So University of Illinois is one of them at Urbana Champaign and actually at Chicago. They also have a chapter and Notre Dame and several other universities. And first the opportunity of being a graduate student chapter gets it's obviously dealing with people and having the opportunity to have leadership roles within your chapter. You know and actually impact the graduate student community in your school. We organize events for students such as social events and academic events, professional events where we bring professionals to talk to the students and actually more gear towards a student interest. And yeah you get the opportunity for organizing events meeting people being leadership roles kind of lead an organization. And then the second part is that you get the opportunity to be in this a graduate student chapter leadership council that this leadership council is kind of the the council that involves all the graduate student chapters in CI. So they think universities can send that they actually they have a representative within this council and this council has a board. The board consists of four for students from different universities. And what we're trying to do is kind of connect these old graduate student chapters together, such as a kind of start interactions with within the graduate student chapters and start collaborations kind of start to build a network of grads, CI graduate student chapters, kind of as an overall organization. And obviously being part of that gives you the opportunity of meeting people from other universities that are actually interested in leadership roles and actually students that are looking forward for the opportunities. So it's really good to meet that kind of people that the people that get involved in this leadership council and also gives you I've been the chair of this council for two years. And now my term is going to end this September but this gave me the opportunity of meeting a lot of people being in charge of this organization, obviously, and the opportunity to go to the CI local leader conference. That it's a small conference that the CI organized for their leaders graduate student chapters and professional chapters leaders, where they just give us leadership training and then you can meet all the other leaders from the professional level and from the student graduate student chapter level, which is also great because you get to meet people with all different kinds of backgrounds, people that have learned many things that you are trying to learn, or you know that give you advice on where to move or where to look. And I think it's just great is being involved with the graduate student chapters and the leadership council and gives you a lot of different tools that you wouldn't get otherwise communication skills. You can imagine that me having as I'm from Mexico so my first language is Spanish I always have a little bit of trouble speaking English. So after I start to get more involved in the graduate student chapter interacting with other students. Although my English is not perfect, it improves a lot. So, and just things like that, you know, it's interactive with other students and being able to meet a lot of people. It's kind of the main thing. I think your English is nothing short of perfect I think it's been really fantastic and the ability to communicate really technical topics in an eloquent fashion as you have in a second language is incredibly difficult. So I commend you and anyone honestly who who is not a native English speaker who comes to the US to study a really scary topic like thunderstorm implications on structural engineering is is that's that's a level of bravery and courage that I think we all could admire that's fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, it's great to see that it's, you know, even in academia, your network and building all these communication skills to it's, it's really important and glad to see that it's, you know, it's still applicable, whether you're trying to go into industry or academia. Antonio I had one last question. Since you know you're going to PhD route for people that are considering the PhD route. Do you have any advice or maybe go through what it's like being a PhD student because that's something I've always wanted to like kind of what the PhD is like go in that route what's it like do you have any advice for people or can you go more into that what it's like being a PhD student. Actually, that's something that I, as I mentioned before, I struggled with when I was making the decision to go for a PhD route. And basically, I think they're two truly important things for deciding to go for a PhD. You have to really love what you're doing, enjoy research a lot. Because if you don't love it, you are not going to get through PhD like, I mean, I think that's true for a lot of things in life. But you have to enjoy what you're doing. But in PhD, like, you're going to evolve if you're not really enjoying what you're doing. And also I think the relationship with your advisor is crucial. If, in my opinion, because your advisor is the one that is guiding you towards like this shady topic that you're just really don't know much and you're starting to explore and your advisor is the one that gives you the guide. And if you have a good relationship with him, it's really good, which I have. And I think that's essential for a PhD. Then how to wait down if doing a PhD or a master's degree, that's actually something that I don't know because I'm not sure if I made the right decision, but I'm happy where I am. But I do feel that the PhD work has given me a more analytical mindset and strategies to solve some difficult problems that I'm sure you can also get in industry. But I don't know, I just feel that I have had the opportunity to deal with challenging problems every day. So yeah, I want to share a little personal story with you that made me actually decide to get a PhD. And basically they were three things that made me decide to pursue a PhD. The first one is what that I really enjoyed what I was working on research and I really enjoyed working with Professor Lombardo, my advisor. And this is really important as I mentioned before. The second is that I had the opportunity to do a PhD in a really top structural engineering university, such as the University of Illinois. And while doing the PhD has given me the opportunity of doing really advanced courses, for example, seismic steel design or other topics that are not specifically related to my research, but I'm interested in as I think that can help me when I'm again a practicing engineer. And three was actually an advice from my dad. And it's, I don't know, who is actually a structural engineer himself with a master's degree. And what he told me is just an analogy that it may work for you or not. But if you look, if you look for years from now, you will have no experience and a PhD, which is probably not as good as having a master's degree with four years of experience. But if you look at 14 years from now, you will have a PhD with 10 years of experience instead of a master's degree with 14 years of experience. The difference on experience will not be that great, but you learn what you will learn with your PhD can give you a lot of tools that you can use towards that experience. And also, the precision, the PhD is basically forever. So if you have the opportunity to do it now, he just encouraged me to do it because basically he told me in the long run he's going to pay off. And that was again his view. I don't know if we'll help you. And this is my experience. But I just wanted to share that with you. And yeah, that's what me needs to go through for the PhD. I think that's a beautiful piece of wisdom and I think, I think we should all be told stuff like an anecdote like that all the time because especially when you're younger. I don't know, something about the beginning of the cusp of your 20s you think, if you don't start now, you're going to miss something. I don't know if it's a phomo culture kind of thing. And if I invest my time to do something else like take a gap year and go travel and see things that you want to do before you settle down and start in practice, or getting something like a master's or PhD, what's going to be the difference. Am I going to be two years for a master? Am I going to be two years behind my colleagues? And when you put it in perspective, well, in 20 years you will have had the additional the additional accolade or the additional academic experience and the experience of years, it's almost doesn't matter because the magnitude is so similar. I think that's a really great mindset to think about these these different ways we want to invest our time is in 10 years in 15 years what's going to be the difference and is the difference enough for you to want to go do this or not. So that's that's really helpful. I think it was a good reminder for me if nothing else I could use that that perspective more often. Yeah, PhD is forever and you know whatever you're investing your time into it's it's going to last forever like no I can take that away from you once you get it. Exactly. And that's not taking anything wrong because I have also probably that only do the master because they don't want to do a PhD. And that's also okay not taking, not kind of taking nothing away from them. But yeah, just the fact that if you're really enjoying what you're doing on research and you truly enjoy and truly want to get a PhD because you're enjoying what you're doing want to learn more. I think taking that perspective of like a long term perspective is is helpful when you're feeling like, oh yeah everybody's getting ahead of me. I think yeah, having that long term perspective was what helped me decide that okay I'm enjoying what I'm doing. I want to do this. It's not going to be that bad. And that's, that's what helped me the advice from my dad. Well and I want to I want to spend one more, one more little bit kind of diving into this because I feel like there's some conflicting information out there so I when I first graduated from college I had an objective I wanted you know I found this fantastic job at Hilti but I wanted to be living in a German speaking country as soon as possible. And in my mind, if I hadn't gotten there if I didn't get there by 25 or 26 I was clearly behind in my career path and I wasn't doing things right or I would I wasn't succeeding and meeting those different objectives I wanted to. I can read a book I don't know if any of our listeners have read this but defining decade is a really fantastic read by Meg Jay about the fact that the your 20s are really, a really intense time of your life in which your brain is I mean your brain is your 25 your prefrontal cortex is your decision making capabilities. And she talks about the differences in your 20s and your 30s and those who spend their 20s doing nothing but self serving, or, or I want to say activities that don't necessarily lead to professional professional and personal development, who then start those activities when they're in their 30s, have lost a decade that often gets you is the catalyst to getting you to where you want to be when you're 30 and 40 and 50 and everything else. And so I felt when I didn't reach my first goal at 25 of being of living in Germany I thought that I was behind. And, you know, I'm not going to it's not going to happen for me until I'm in my 30s at this point. I just think it's so interesting because if someone had told me at 23, it's okay to spend seven, eight, 10 years developing yourself and spending the time to do activities here that are going to make the experience so much better when you get there. I would have thought of it completely different. And I think the same as for your PhD, you know, you you found this passion in in wind engineering. And if you hadn't spent the additional four years to get your PhD, would you be enjoying your practice that much more in 10 years in 15 years without that information that you so wanted to go and learn more about. And so I think if there's if there's anyone out there who is confused or is trying to figure out whether you should or should not do something. It's worth the patience and investment of time to make sure that you do achieve those things that you want to but be patient with your schedule so especially our young listeners, you don't have to set the world on fire by 25 or 30 and it's okay if it you know if some of those things really come to fruition later in life. Something I wish I had told my my younger self. And it sounds like you're lucky enough to have a dad who told you that when you needed it. Excellent. Well, now that I've gone that rant, just to wrap it up, Antonio, how can our listeners benefit from your research and where is it that they connect with you. And yeah, so hopefully they will benefit from my research once it's done and published out actually in as seven. As a actually low as a win load to the same for against understand, but as of now, we publish most some of the outcome of our research and our research website and Twitter. So for our research website, you can just go win the union at you and you see and it should be the first thing thing that pops up that's a research website you can also find my contact information there like my email at Illinois.edu I'm not going to try to spell it because if you go there and you see it, you're going to see why I'm not trying to do that. And also in the two in Twitter, we publish a lot of kind of short. Summaries of what we do sometimes when we find interesting stuff in the field, because we also do some damage surveys or interesting stuff in the research we do publishing in Twitter that the handle is at wind lab. And Twitter, so I think you can find it and you can connect with me through LinkedIn or really send me an email. And I also do have a Twitter account that it's at salvi but not my last nine. One nine nine one year of birth. So that's what I post up a lot of my things with the research and when you need to stop related so yeah to LinkedIn, you can email me if you prefer to mail me if you have any questions or you want to share something. Yeah. Thank you so much again for for having me here. I really enjoyed talking to you guys. Yeah, thanks so much Antonio we really appreciate you coming on. It's always fascinating for me to kind of hear, you know where our code stuff comes from and how they even come up with the, with all the things in the code and, you know, for you talking about wind engineering it's. I never knew that about thunderstorms and it's always fascinating to see that there's still so much out there in structural engineering so thanks so much for that and for giving all the great advice that you gave to graduate students and people that are looking to become a PhD or go to the PhD route so thanks again. Thank you so much for having me. We hope you enjoyed the episode today we'd love to hear your feedback comments and or questions to leave them please visit structural engineering channel.com. There you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode which is episode number 30. As well you can find links to any of the resources websites or books mentioned during the episode and don't forget to subscribe on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. Until next time we wish you the best and all of your structural engineering endeavors.