Thomas Meng is a PhD student in Structural Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. Alongside his PhD research, he works at Arup in the structural engineering team, specialising in the design of buildings.

Me at the Birds Nest June 2024

Thomas’s research on the Seismic Resilience of Timber Structures is supervised by Professor Hamid Valipour. More broadly, his professional interests include:

  • Structural engineering and analysis (Oasys GSA, Strand7, ABAQUS),
  • Mass timber structures,
  • Seismic engineering,
  • Computational design and digital engineering (Grasshopper and Rhino3D), and
  • Programming (mainly Python and C#).

Background

Thomas studied a Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Queensland (UQ) between 2017 to 2020, and graduated with First Class Honours (GPA 6.4/7). His honours project was titled “An Object-Oriented Approach to Structural Definitions” and was supervised by Dr Joe Gattas. The project explored ways of applying concepts developed in software engineering (Object Oriented Programming Paradigm) to increase the quality of engineering data embedded in structural analysis models.

After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Arup Brisbane in the Building Structures team and collaborated with teams around the world (Los Angeles, London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Chicago, New York, Taipei). Beyond international projects, he has worked on a variety of city shaping local projects, including: Brisbane Metro, Sydney Opera House, QPAC New Performing Arts Venue, and Port of Townsville Cruise Terminal.

Between 2021 and 2024, Thomas played an instrumental role first as a software developer, then as a project manager for a structural and facade inspection application made with Unity3D. The app has been deployed on a portfolio of projects across Australasia and has been used in capturing tens of thousands of images across dozens of sites.

In 2024 Thomas was awarded an Australian Government Research Training Scholarship (RTP) and commenced a PhD at UNSW in Sydney to study the structural behaviour of mass timber systems and connections. These days his time is divided between his commitments to research, work, and teaching.

Outside of his professional interests, Thomas dabbles in:

  • Public transport and infrastructure,
  • Free and Open Source Software,
  • Photography,
  • Cycling,
  • Linguistics (mostly phonology and sound changes), and
  • Language learning (Mandarin).

If you’re in Sydney and would like to chat about structural engineering, timber structures, computational design, do reach out.