Courtney Lynn Davis, a WSU master’s student who completed her degree in December, has won the Masonry Society’s 2009 award for Best Master’s Thesis.
Conclusions and recommendations made in her thesis inspired several significant changes to the Masonry Standards Joint Committee Building Code for masonry structures.
The Masonry Society, founded in 1977, is an international professional, technical and educational association dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about masonry. There are approximately 650 members.
A Portland, Ore., native, Davis graduated from WSU in 2007 with a B.S. in civil engineering. She was active in the Society of Women in Engineering, Order of the Engineer, American Society of Civil Engineers and Gamma Phi Beta sorority. She spent her freshman through junior year summers working as an intern at two structural engineering firms.
As an undergraduate, she worked on two research projects building concrete forms and foundations. As a WSU graduate student, she received a research assistantship to explore the performance of shear design standards for masonry.
In December 2008, Davis completed her award-winning thesis, “Evaluation of Design Provisions for In-Plane Shear in Masonry Walls,” and earned her M.S. in civil engineering with a structural emphasis.
She works in New Orleans, La., on a hurricane protection system with INCA Engineers, a company headquartered in Bellevue, Wash.
