Matiyas A. Bezabeh

Professor Bezabeh specializes in the evaluation and design of timber and timber-hybrid structures for earthquakes and strong winds. Prior to joining McGill, he worked as a Scientist/Technical Coordinator at Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin (RWDI) Inc. At RWDI, he coordinated the technical teams tasked with finding solutions to challenges linked to the wind design of tall and complicated buildings. These solutions involved wind tunnel testing and dynamic structural analysis. He received his Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada, in 2021 and 2014, respectively. He developed a displacement-based seismic design guideline for a novel steel-timber hybrid structure as part of his M.A.Sc. project at UBC, which was funded by the NewBuilds network initiative. He spent four years as a visiting research student at Western University (UWO) and conducted numerous wind tunnel studies at Western's WindEEE Dome and Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory (BLWTL). His doctoral work developed new performance-based wind design frameworks for tall buildings. The frameworks are included in the new Modeling Guide for Timber Structures and the second edition of Canada's Technical Guide for the Design and Construction of Tall Wood Buildings published by FPInnovations. He also spent a semester at Kyoto University developing closed-form solutions for the seismic response of self-centering structural systems through the Mitacs-JSPS Fellowship. At the World Conference on Timber Engineering (WCTE), he received the Young Scientist Excellence Award in 2018. He is currently a member of the ASCE's Performance-Based Wind Engineering Task Committee of the SEI Technical Activities Division.

Professor Bezabeh's research focuses on promoting resilient and sustainable urban development through tall timber buildings. In particular, he is interested in performance-based wind and seismic design of tall timber and hybrid buildings, seismic risk assessment of mass timber buildings, self-centering systems, uncertainty modeling and propagation, aeroelastic instability of structures, wind directionality, hybrid aeroelastic wind tunnel testing, the inelastic response of tall buildings with supplemental damping systems, and near-collapse behavior of structures subjected to strong non-synoptic wind systems.