Dr. Erik Khanbabaian

Most structural engineering is predictive: given a design, what will it do? Forensic work runs the other way. A structure has already behaved — cracked, deflected, corroded, collapsed — and the engineer has to reconstruct the load history, the material state, and the sequence that produced what is now in front of them.

That reconstruction has to survive scrutiny it does not choose. In litigation it faces opposing experts. Under public contract it faces audit. Before a code body it faces the people who wrote the provision being questioned. The standard is the same in all three: another competent engineer, given the same evidence, must be able to follow the same path to the same finding.

Reverse engineering is the harder version of the same problem — where the drawings are missing, incomplete, or contradicted by what was actually built, and capacity has to be established from the structure itself. Dr. Khanbabaian develops the firm’s own analysis tooling for this work, because commercial software presumes a documented design that in these matters does not exist.