Kevin Q. Walsh PhD, PE, SE, '09

Biography

Dr. Kevin Q. Walsh, PhD, PE, SE is a structural engineer and educator whose teaching and research bring technical emphasis to the stewardship of the built environment and the AEC industry. He holds a concurrent faculty appointment in the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, alongside his primary role as an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences, where he directs the professional Master of Engineering (MEng) program. His work sits at the intersection of the AEC subdomains, with particular emphasis on historic preservation, professional practice, and advanced structural materials.

Historic preservation anchors much of Dr. Walsh's teaching and scholarship. He teaches an architecture course on Historic Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability. His research develops holistic, repeatable methods for evaluating the seismic risk of heritage masonry. As Principal Investigator on an ongoing study of historic Catholic churches in Italy, he led faculty, graduate, and undergraduate teams in on-site surveys of 72 unreinforced masonry medieval churches, applying a hierarchical framework that defines hazard, vulnerability, exposure, and consequence through quantitative indices and a macro-block analysis of the geometric components most prone to collapse. The resulting risk rankings help stakeholders prioritize churches for detailed analysis and retrofit. Related efforts include non-destructive testing of historic materials, an aggregated Masonry Quality Index for portfolios of aging structures, and non-linear finite-element modeling of case-study churches built from drone-captured point clouds. He is concurrently a co-investigator on projects testing historic masonry materials across the U.S. Midwest, New Zealand, and Myanmar, timber diaphragm retrofits in Italy, and mortarless masonry cladding in New Mexico. This preservation work extends into field and community engagement, from heritage surveys of historic structures in Ireland to the structural evaluation and retrofit of historic clay brick church towers and the documentation of Indiana's historic churches in collaboration with Indiana Landmarks.

Professional practice is central to how Dr. Walsh both works and teaches. He is concurrently a Principal at Frost Engineering & Consulting in Mishawaka, Indiana, where he designs or serves as the Engineer of Record or QA/QC Engineer across the commercial, industrial, multi-residential, educational, medical, data center, and public infrastructure sectors. He has held Professional Engineer (PE) or Structural Engineer (SE) registration in 25 states. He brings this practice directly into the classroom, directing the professional MEng program and leading courses such as Principles of Practice and Design Capstone that prepare students for the realities of AEC practice via heavy industry interaction and real-world design and construction projects. In his research, he strategically partners with industry so that findings translate into implementable design standards and guidelines.

Dr. Walsh's advanced materials research centers on pultruded fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) structural framing as a sustainable, non-corrosive, and lightweight alternative for infrastructure exposed to harsh environments. Working with partners in design, fabrication and installation, and manufacturing, he has led experimental testing of pultruded FRP panels, beams, and connections, including rotationally semi-rigid beam-to-column connections, using digital image correlation and multi-axis instrumentation paired with finite-element simulation of in-service frames. Recent research involves the heat and fire performance of pultruded FRP. This research aims to reduce life-cycle maintenance and corrosion costs for applications ranging from pedestrian and short-span vehicular bridges to coastal, agricultural, and mission-critical facilities, and it informs emerging design provisions for pultruded FRP framing. In 2026, he received the American Composites Manufacturers Association (ACMA) Academic Pioneer Award at the 2026 Composites and Advanced Materials Expo (CAMX) in Atlanta.

Dr. Walsh earned a Bachelor of Civil Engineering from the University of Dayton, a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has published more than 35 peer-reviewed journal articles along with numerous conference papers and technical reports. In 2023, he received the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.