Sarah Jeanne

Sarah joined Linchpin as an EIT and is working toward her PE license. She works mostly on commercial projects in concrete and wood. Collaborating closely with senior engineers, she has contributed to the reconstruction of the Santa Cruz Butterfly Boardwalk. She is especially drawn to wood design for its versatility, including the growing use of mass timber.

Sarah earned her bachelor’s degree at Southern Utah University, where she founded the school’s ASCE student chapter. While at SUU, she also served as project manager for the construction of a tiny home for workers at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah.

She went on to complete graduate research at the University of Nevada, Reno on secondary earthquake-resisting systems for California bridges. She helped design two quarter-scale bridge bent prototypes and led their construction, working hands-on with concrete formwork and pours, rod busting, welding, and installing instrumentation for data collection. Both prototypes were tested to failure in the lab, where she saw how they performed under simulated earthquake loading. Seeing the project through design, construction, and testing strengthened her intuition for practical design. It also gave her a real understanding of how dynamics applies to structural engineering, which is a big part of why she enjoys earthquake design.

Outside of work, Sarah is a rugby player with famously bad coordination, except when there’s a rugby ball in her hands. She is competitive about nearly everything, and the fastest way to get her interested in something is to keep score.