I’m currently a Senior Lecturer in Civil Engineering at the University of Waikato (UoW), earning my PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Auckland and my master’s in Earthquake Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

Before joining UoW, I worked as a Lecturer at the University of Auckland. After completing my master’s, I spent a year with Geodata Spa, one of the world’s leading engineering firms for underground structures, where I specialised in tunnel portal design, steel construction, seismic design of steel structures, and the design of underground structures.

Following my PhD, I worked as a Research and Development Manager at Kiwi Steel Holding LTD for two years before returning to academia at the University of Auckland as a Lecturer. Over the last eight years, my research has focused on thin-walled structures, covering a diverse range of topics such as modular construction, built-up columns and beams, cold-formed steel connections, cross-section optimisation, stainless steel, aluminium structures, corroded steel members, and 3D-printed structures. I’ve also explored the durability and weathertightness of cold-formed steel members, design methodologies, and general stability and inelastic buckling.

My current research interests include the fire performance of cold-formed steel structures, applying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for structural prediction, and conducting sustainability and life cycle analyses of structures. More recently, I’ve been developing environmental models for life cycle assessment of steel structures and working on methodologies for calculating the embodied carbon (carbon footprint) of different structural materials.

To date, I’ve authored and co-authored 2 book chapters, 15 conference papers, and over 170 journal papers in prestigious Scopus-indexed international journals. My work has garnered more than 4,700 citations on Google Scholar, with an h-index of 40.

Kris’s recent kōrero