Dr. Thennavan M

Dr. Thennavan M is a structural and earthquake engineer and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Earthquake Engineering at IIT Roorkee. His work is about keeping seismic energy out of structures rather than asking structures to endure it. He designs passive and tunable energy-dissipating devices and takes them from concept and constitutive model to patent. Four Indian patent applications have come from this work so far, one of them granted.

He received his PhD from IIT Madras in 2024 under Prof. Srinivasan Chandrasekaran. His thesis developed a coped steel beam for offshore topsides with a functionally graded stiffener, printed by wire arc additive manufacturing from carbon-manganese steel graded to Stellite 6. He tested the beams to failure and under drop-weight impact from 1 to 10 m, validated finite element models against every test series, and showed that the stiffener reduces strain and displacement at the cope.

From October 2024 to January 2026 he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Naples Federico II, working with Prof. Nicolò Vaiana and Prof. Daniele Losanno on hysteretic modelling and eco-friendly seismic protection of underground tunnels under the EU-funded PRIN 2022 PNRR project. His Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship proposal received the European Commission’s Seal of Excellence. He is open to faculty positions, collaboration on vibration-control devices, and consultancy in seismic assessment and retrofit.