Cristiano Loss
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Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Supervision Enquiry
Graduate Student Supervision
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
All over the world, the mass timber construction industry is experiencing unprecedented growth. However, as mass timber buildings reach new heights, designers are faced with new challenges regarding constructability, sustainability, and compliance with performance-based design requirements. In particular, there is a need for novel connection solutions that are conducive to off-site prefabrication, quick on-site assembly, and that can provide required seismic resistance without suffering damage, creating the potential for deconstruction and reuse. This research investigated the structural performance of a novel multi-material shear connector for mass timber and hybrid timber-based buildings, consisting of a threaded steel rod embedded into Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), reinforced with a ring-layer of epoxy-based grout. The protruding rods may be bolted to steel beams or hold-down plates to form hybrid timber-based floor and shear wall structural assemblies, respectively. The shear connector is to be capacity-protected, resulting in a damage-free connection, allowing for disassembly and potential reuse of the structural timber components. The response of shear connectors with varying rod diameter and steel strength-class, grout thickness, and CLT grade was analyzed. An insight into the behaviour under quasi-static monotonic incremental loads is given based on a comprehensive experimental campaign, with a total of 240 push-out tests performed on full-scale squared CLT specimens, including baseline samples without grout reinforcement. Test results revealed significant improvement in shear capacity and stiffness when a grout layer is included, without negatively impacting ductility and failure modes. Strong relationships between rod and grout diameter and yield and maximum shear resistance were established. Reliability analyses established a resistance factor in order to achieve similar levels of reliability across connector types and with dowel-type connectors already in the Canadian wood design standard CSA-O86. The results are encouraging and serve as a foundation for further research on this novel connector, including testing CLT assemblies and developing reliable mechanics-based models. From a design perspective, the studied multi-material shear connector has great potential for tall and large-scale timber building applications, giving designers a high-capacity alternative to traditional timber connectors.
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