3/12/2024 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
Teaching Assistant Professor Tom Golecki, PE, SE, recently joined the ranks of MechSE faculty after completing his PhD in civil engineering (structural concentration) at Illinois.
Golecki earned dual bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering and architectural engineering and a master’s in civil engineering (structural) from Drexel University. He then joined the engineering firm Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, working at the headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“A lot of structural engineering positions focus on things like buildings or bridges, but [my position] at SGH was a bit different,” Golecki recalled. “It gave me the opportunity to work on a lot of really unique structures, which I enjoyed.”
After six years with the firm, Golecki moved to Intelligent Infrastructure Systems (IIS) (later acquired by Pennoni) to do structural health monitoring.
“We did a lot of instrumentation and monitoring-related projects, which was also not typical for civil structural engineers,” Golecki said.
A new opportunity presented itself when Golecki’s wife, Teaching Assistant Professor Holly Golecki, was offered a faculty position at Illinois after completing her PhD in engineering sciences at Harvard University.
“I’d been curious about getting a PhD for a long time and [moving to Illinois] was a good opportunity,” Golecki said. “The timing was right to make the change.”
Having grown up in northeast Pennsylvania and lived in Philadelphia, relocating to the Midwest was certainly going to be a new adventure. The onset of Covid-19 in early 2020 made it even more so.
“It was a whirlwind,” Golecki said of his transition from industry back to academia. “I started in fall 2019 and in spring, Covid hit. The social part of the graduate program became more challenging after that.”
Still, Golecki stayed active in the program and focused his dissertation research on topology optimization for dynamic bridge structures. Traditionally, topology optimization approaches analyze structures under a single static load—in other words, with zero acceleration.
“I wanted to account for the random dynamics of bridge traffic in design optimization,” Golecki said of his approach.
Currently teaching TAM 212 (introductory dynamics), Golecki said he enjoys being able to connect lecture topics to relevant problems and trends from industry. “I can speak from firsthand experience to show students common pitfalls in engineering problem solving, like keeping track of units or properly documenting your work,” he said. “I can give them examples of physical things out in the world that someone had to do some course-related calculations for.”
He also enjoys engaging students in classroom experiments. “During my job in structural health monitoring, we did a lot of static and dynamic analysis of structures, which meant being able to measure strain or acceleration and then use the data to interpret something about the structural response,” he recalled. “This can be shown on a smaller scale in class using a cellphone to measure an acceleration. I think it’s helpful for students to see the connection of course content to what engineers do in industry.”