Congratulations to Luis Berg (MS, 2022), the recipient of the SOM Structural Engineering Fellowship! The $20,000 fellowship is awarded annually to a graduating student based in the United States who specializes in structural engineering to conduct independent travel and research that contributes to the SOM Foundation's mission.
Luis will explore the relationships among material, people, and nature through case studies of select structures to understand their connection to three core concepts: community impact, environmental sustainability, and engineering innovation. The aim is to motivate material use that, respecting culture and generating knowledge, builds for a better and more efficient tomorrow.
Luis, a Bay Area native, earned his Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Davis and has worked on building and bridge design, as well as in risk and resilience consulting, at MOST Engineers in Barcelona, TY Lin International in Oakland, and Arup in San Francisco. He recently submitted his thesis (titled, "Seismic Impact Inference with Satellites, Seismographs, and Structural Metamodels," advised by Prof. Matthew DeJong) and graduated with a Master of Science in the Structural Engineering, Mechanics, and Materials (SEMM) Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
After graduating—with the 2022 SOM Foundation Structural Engineering Fellowship—he will travel across five continents, twenty-two countries, and countless cities in pursuit of research that aims to highlight responsible relationships with structural materiality. Luis has also been selected as a finalist for the Chile Science Initiative Award from the Fulbright Program (2022-2023) via the U.S. Department of State. So, after his journey around the world, he will move to Santiago to join the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile as a fully-funded Fulbright Researcher at the National Research Center for Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN).
Looking forward, his hope is to be engaged in work that will promote systematic resilience against natural hazards within the context of infrastructure and international development in Latin America.