Structural engineering student wins Dean's Graduate Achievement Award

By Peter Murphy

This honor is given to “exceptional graduate students who have contributed significantly to the advancement of their field through the performance of outstanding research,” according to the award’s description.

Snaiki joined UB as a master’s student with a Fullbright scholarship in 2014. He worked on a project with assistant professor Teng Wu, who is now Snaiki’s advisor. “I noticed Reda works hard, is always motivated and shows capability of facing new challenges,” Wu says.

During his MS study, he won second place in the 2016 Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Poster Competition, and was a finalist in a student paper competition at the Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference that same year.

Since joining Wu’s research group in 2016, Snaiki has published three papers in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics and has proposed a new model for rapid estimating wind field within the boundary layer of Nor’easters.

“Reda has the passion to dig out the underlying mechanism of a problem,” Wu says, “since joining my research group as a PhD student, his performance has been simply outstanding.”