SOM Foundation Announces Jury for the 2026 Structural Engineering Fellowship

Vicki Arbitrio is an Associate Partner at Gilsanz Murray Steficek. In her over forty-year career as a structural engineer she has worked on a wide range of projects, both new construction and renovation, as well as specialty projects such as art installations and forensic reports. She serves on the Board of Directors for the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations Foundation. She is a Past-President of the Applied Technology Council, and a Past-President of NCSEA. Arbitrio teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and at the Syracuse School of Architecture.

Nathan Brown is an Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering at Penn State University, where his research and teaching seek to reveal how structural considerations interact with other performance and architectural criteria in conceptual building design, and how computation can play a role in the creative process. He holds a PhD and SM in Building Technology from MIT and a BSE in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University. He has worked for BuroHappold in Boston as a computational designer and on building energy retrofit projects for Elevate Energy in Chicago. He was the recipient of the SOM Foundation’s 2016 Structural Engineering Travel Fellowship.

Caitlin Mueller is an Associate Professor at MIT in Architecture and in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She leads the Digital Structures research group, directs the Building Technology program, and serves as Associate Director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Trained at MIT and Stanford, she joined the MIT faculty in 2014. Since then, she has led research advancing computational design and digital fabrication methods to create innovative, high-performance buildings and structures that support a more sustainable and equitable future. Her work has been recognized through major awards, including the 2021 ACADIA Innovative Research Award of Excellence, the 2022 ACSA Diversity Achievement Award, seven best paper awards, and Architectural Record’s inaugural Innovator of the Year distinction in 2025. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, and her research has been demonstrated in built projects such as the 2022 Sueños con Tierra y Concreto pavilion in Mexico City, multiple installations at the 2025 Venice Biennale, and Janet Echelman’s 2025 Remembering the Future sculpture at the MIT Museum. She is also cofounder of two startups: Forma Systems and Pixelframe.

Edward M. (Ted) Segal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at Hofstra University and leads the Segal Structures Group. The group engages in material exploration, form generation, and historic analysis related to a range of engineering research, design, and teaching activities. Segal received the ExCEED (Excellence in Civil Engineering Education) Teaching Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2017, and in 2019 he was selected to be an ASCE ExCEEd Fellow. He received his BS from Cornell University and his MSE and PhD from Princeton University. From 2008 to 2011, Segal worked at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger designing glass and metal enclosures. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in New York. He was the recipient of the SOM Foundation’s 2008 Structural Engineering Travel Fellowship.

Yunlu Shen (Chair) is an Associate Principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Her engineering work encompasses a broad range of structures, including super-tall towers, museums and cultural centers, renovations, and pedestrian bridges. Notable recent projects include Two Manhattan West, Highline Moynihan Connector, National Museum of the US Army, and 510 Fifth Avenue renovation. She received her Bachelor of Engineering from McGill University in Montreal and her Master of Applied Science from the University of Toronto. Shen is an active member of the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) and was president of the association in 2023–2024.