As Principal of DeSimone’s Forensics Practice, Juan Carlos Araiza provides technical oversight and management of the firm’s forensics team encompassing both pre and post-loss services.
Dr. Araiza has over twenty years of design, construction, and research experience related to the evaluation of existing structures, structural health monitoring, and forensic engineering. He also has extensive experience with structural dynamics and advanced finite element modeling applied to failure analysis.
Dr. Araiza holds a Ph.D. in Structural Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain (Barcelona Tech). His research and consulting work has encompassed the use of dynamic testing for the assessment of a wide variety of buildings and structures in the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. He is an active member of the ASCE Forensic Engineering Division and the ACI Committee 444 on Structural Health Monitoring. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the states of Texas, Florida, California, and also in Mexico.
From 2003 to 2007, he served as a consultant on structural engineering and preservation of ancient structures to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico. From 2007 to 2009, Dr. Araiza worked at Sparks Engineering, Inc. in Texas where he was responsible for evaluation and repair-rehabilitation projects of historic structures in the United States. In 2009, Dr. Araiza joined Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates as a Project Manager where he developed a wide variety of projects including failure analysis, seismic retrofit, structural retrofit, and litigation consulting. In 2013, Dr. Araiza joined CTLGroup where he served as Principal Engineer and oversaw client relations in the Southern Region of the United States and in Latin America.