Shiling Pei is an associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. He has been researching timber building systems for years. “I consider myself an experimentalist,” says Pei, also a licensed civil engineer in California. His latest wood research in resilient performance-based seismic design is historic. As principal investigator for the National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure TallWood Project, Pei is leading a team that tested a resilient 10-story “rocking-wall” frame, composed of vertically post-tensioned cross-laminated-timber, on an outdoor shake table at the University of California San Diego. The 112-ft-tall specimen was the tallest full-scale structure ever tested on a shake table, says NHERI.