By Kaye Bilbao Regalado
Will Shaffer, a second-year PhD student at UC Irvine, likes details. Even when he is just driving by a construction site, he is thinking about a lot of things. The construction sites. The foundations. The ground improvements. Who is doing the work? What kind of work are they doing? What is their timeline?
For some, these might be tedious details, but for Will, they are not.
“Spreadsheets, calculations. Some people think it’s like torture. It’s not really that way for me. I like those things,” he said. “I like seeing how things work,” Will said.
And it is all these thoughts and his curious mind that have carried him through his journey through the field of engineering.
This year, he has received several awards: the American Society of Civil Engineering Los Angeles Geo Institute (ASCE G-I) Chapter Scholarship, a Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) Scholarship, and an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Scholarship. All of these awards support excellence in STEM fields, including engineering.
At UC Irvine, Will does work in geotechnical engineering, specifically, in the field of deep foundations. In short, the discipline is concerned with building with earth-based materials — like soil, rocks, dams — and how they relate to things below the ground.
As a field that deals with what is under the ground, there are a lot of unknown factors. A geotech engineer cannot anticipate everything that is under the ground. Will likes the little freedoms these unknown factors can provide. It makes his work, at times, artful. “It’s an art and a science,” he says. “There’s still a little bit of art to it.”
As a researcher, Will studies extreme loading, which includes extreme events, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and impacts, and how structures may respond to these events to keep infrastructure safe and stable.
But where does the root of his passion come from?
Will ties back his interest in engineering to his early interest in math and science. He found engineering to be a good bridge between those two subjects and decided to pursue it. After all, he was curious about it.
“How do these buildings pop up? It’s not magic.” he said.
After declaring a Civil Engineering major for his undergraduate studies, he began to learn about engineering. Although it certainly was not magic, he found that he enjoyed it. Specifically, he liked how practical and applicable it was.
“In high school, you’re doing all these math and science problems, but you’re not really applying it.” He said. “It’s all made up stuff. Now, we’re [doing] that, but applying it to something that’s real. Something that you can see. I fell in love with it.”
After completing his master’s degree at Virginia Tech in 2018, he worked in the field of foundations in Tennessee for 5 years. Working directly in the field, he was really able to see his engineering work come off the page.
“Everything has a math and science basis, but now you’re actually seeing structures be built.”
After working in the field for a while, ever curious, Will decided to return to school for his PhD. This time to UC Irvine.
“I thought there’d be some value in going back to school with a perspective on what you’re learning and why you’re learning it,” he said. “I still had a curiosity for learning more, for research.”
Will’s first interaction with his current advisor, Professor Anne Lemnitzer, was through her research. At that time, he was still in the workforce, and he was facing a practical issue in the field, but through the referencing of her work, he was able to address that issue in a real workspace.
“I was using her work. At work.” He said.
This experience planted a seed, and that seed eventually led him to UC Irvine. Seeing how research helped him as an engineer, he now does research that he hopes will benefit other engineers. Today, Will deeply values the work he does with Professor Lemnitzer and makes good use of UC Irvine’s lab facilities. His curiosity endures.
Much like the bridges Will studies, he has a passion for bridging gaps in knowledge and sharing the fruits of his curiosity with the world.
Photo caption: Will Shaffer and his advisor Professor Lemnitzer at the ASCE G-I LA Chapter scholarship award dinner.
Photo caption: While Will worked for Dan Brown and Associates, LLC, he contributed to the design and construction of The Nashville International Airport (BNA) International Arrivals Facility expansion, pictured above.