Melissa Burton is the Operations Director for Canada and a Principal in Arup’s Toronto office. Previously, she was the Canada Consulting Practice Leader. Melissa’s technical work at Arup focuses on climate modelling and wind engineering applications.

She has served as senior technical expert on many international projects where she optimized design and reduced wind loads for large roof structures, buildings and bridges.

Melissa has extensive experience using large volumes of data to develop climate models for wind codes, investigating the interaction of wind and the built environment. Her technical expertise extends to the use of advanced analytical tools to quantify and reduce design risk from wind and climate loading. In addition, she leads Arup’s Americas Wind Skills Network and serves on the Board of Directors at the Applied Technology Council (ATC), whose mandate is to promote state of the art applications for use in mitigating the effects of natural hazards on the built environment.

Melissa most recently collaborated with the Charles Pankow Foundation to publish criteria and methodologies for performance and resilience-based wind design. This publication forms a pre-standard for wind design of buildings to the ASCE-7 design code. She has deep expertise in using tools to simulate wind flows, from wind tunnel testing to computational fluid dynamics through to water flumes. She serves on the ASCE7-49 committee setting standards for wind flow modelling.