CTBUH Profile - Dr. Sam Lee

Dr. Sam Lee studied building structural design at Tsinghua University in China, receiving his double bachelor degrees of engineering mechanics and structural engineering in 1988. He spent eight years working for The Architectural Design and Research Institute of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou China. During this period, he was involved in the structural design and documentation of more than 30 tall buildings, most of which exceeded 100m in height, including the Qingdao China Construction Bank (33 stories, 100m tall) and the Guangan Masion (150m tall) in Hainan Province.

In 1996, he moved to Sydney, Australia with his family and joined Henry & Hymas as a structural engineer. He developed a tilt-up panel lifting program call TiltMAX, where firstly, the optimum lifting point locations are identified and finally using FEA method to analyze the panels and obtain accurate stress distribution in the panel during lifting. The program is currently in use in many Australian structural consulting firms.

In 2004, he was awarded a PhD degree from the school of civil and environmental engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His major research areas included: (1) Semi-analytical structural analysis methods base on partial differential equations ;(2) Fast algorithms for nonlinear dynamic structural analysis ;(3) Nonlinear programming for structural analysis ;(4) The nonlinear dynamic analysis of tall buildings. He also developed a program called BEPTA (Building Elastic-Plastic Time history Analysis) on ABAQUS platform, specific for the nonlinear dynamic analysis of skyscrapers.

In 2006 he moved back to China and co-found Guangzhou Scientific Computing Consultant Co. Ltd (GZSC). Since then he has directed the development of nonlinear dynamic earthquake analysis of skyscrapers for the company, and is responsible for a wide range of CAE technologies at GZSC, including ABAQUS. Some nonlinear dynamic earthquake analysis projects are list as follows:

- Shanghai World Financial Center (101 stories, 500m tall, 2004), Landmark building of Shanghai
- Guangzhou HeJing Mansion (45 stories, 199m tall, 2005)
- CCTV New Headquarters (250m tall twin slant towers, 2006), Landmark building of Beijing
- Guangzhou XiTa (101 stories, 435m tall, 2006), Landmark building of Guangzhou
- Tianjin JinTa (80 stories, 350m tall, 2007), Landmark building of Tianjin

He has also spoken at several national and international conferences on nonlinear dynamic earthquake analysis of skyscrapers and has published numerous research papers.