Building Resilient Homes: Strategies for Flood, Hail, and High Wind Protection in Ontario

Professor Greg Kopp

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Western Ontario

Professor G.A. Kopp received a B.Sc.M.E. from the University of Manitoba in 1989, a M.Eng. from McMaster University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 1995. Between 1995 and 1997 he held a NSERC Post-doctoral Fellowship in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. He returned to Canada in the summer of 1997 to an appointment of Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario and as a Senior Research Engineer at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory. He was promoted to Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering in July 2007 (and has a cross-appointment in the Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering). In January 2015 he was appointed Associate Dean (Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies) in the Faculty of Engineering.

Dr. Kopp’s expertise and research projects relate to mitigating damage to structures during extreme wind storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Details include model-scale wind tunnel and full-scale component test methods, field surveys of damage caused by tornadoes, building aerodynamics, wind effects on building component and cladding systems, tornado and thunderstorm winds, wind loads on solar arrays, the role of turbulence on wind loads, wind-borne debris and turbulent shear flows.

Simon Eng

Research Meteorologist, Northern Hail Project, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Western University

Simon Eng is the Research Meteorologist with Western University’s Northern Hail Project and has been with the project since it began in the spring of 2022. Simon has a combined background in atmospheric science and civil engineering and has spent his career studying the interactions between high-impact atmospheric hazards and the built environment. In his current role, he is focused on hail occurrence data collection, hail impacts investigations and meteorological analysis of major hail events.
Prior to this, he was a consultant in the climate change risk assessment and adaptation solutions development space, assessing climate and severe weather risks for municipalities and critical infrastructure across Canada