“My main goal is to help people …

December 2021
Meet Papa Sekyi-Djan. He is an engineer, a graduate structural engineer. And he is working on his first project that he will have seen through from start to finish.

Papa Sekyi-Djan

Papa was born in Ghana, took his master degree at the University of Nottingham University and joined Whitby Wood two years ago. He says: “Engineering is about impacting people’s daily lives through the built environment and that is what pushed me to become and engineer – to help build more-sustainable societies through the structures we design”.

He is working on our Dalston Lane project, which combines a basement club, two levels of concrete frame offices and five levels of CLT/steel perimeter column hotel accommodation in East London. His contributions include the detailed design of elements such as the basement slab, the defining of the column layout, work on the whole-building analysis model and stability system, and co-ordination with the architect. Site constraints include a Thames Water sewer, and Papa helped organise a CCTV sewer survey.

“The job of co-ordinating stuff gives you a better appreciation of the engineering, the process of thinking about the users and how best the building should be designed.”

In the long term, he would like to use his skills and experience to help develop communities in his home country. Running a future Whitby Wood Ghanaian hub perhaps?

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