Personal Statement

Kirk Martini teaches structural design as well as photography at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and currently serves as associate dean for academics. He received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980, a Master of Science in Structural Engineering and a Master of Architecture in 1982, and a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering in 1990: all from U.C. Berkeley. He is a licensed Civil Engineer in California and has worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in San Francisco. In 1989 he worked as a graduate student summer intern at Taisei Construction in Tokyo, and completed post-doctoral studies at Tokyo University in 1992. Since then, he has taught at UVa, where he received a Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellowship, two Teaching and Technology Fellowships, and a resident fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. In 2007, his Arcade software for interactive non-linear dynamic structural analysis won the Premier award for engineering education software. In 2008 he won a UVa. All-University Teaching Award. His research interests include design and planning for wind and earthquakes, non-linear structural analysis, and interactive computer animation.