Paul Mayencourt

Mass timber, structural design, structural optimization

Dr. Paul Mayencourt is a researcher and educator in low-carbon design solutions for the built environment. His research merges the field of structural design, forestry, and materials. Paul explores creative low-carbon approaches for building structures by leveraging recent advances in manufacturing technologies and computational optimization. He currently studies the use of undervalued timber resources such as small-diameter timbers and underutilized Californian hardwoods species for high-performance architectural and engineering applications.

Paul Mayencourt is assistant professor of Cooperative Extension in Engineered Woods Products and Design between the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the Department of Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. He earned a PhD in architecture in building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an MSc in structural engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), and a BSc in civil engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He worked for two years as a licensed structural engineer in Zurich. Paul has taught structural design and mass timber construction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of Washington (UW), and the University of California, Berkeley.