Darama’s specialty is structural engineering, and his areas of expertise include seismic base isolation, supplementary damping systems, nonlinear response history analysis, and performance-based design.
He began his career as a research engineer with Nippon Koei in Japan. Later he joined Arup. For over 20 years, he has contributed to the civil engineering field through his research and project work across the world. His list of notable projects includes the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas; Wrapper Tower in Los Angeles; LAX Central Utility Plant Replacement, Los Angeles; California Science Center, Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion, Los Angeles; Indio Juvenile and Family Courthouse, Indio, California; Denver Art Museum Addition, Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Denver; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Taipei Performing Arts Centre, Taipei, Taiwan; and Sabiha Gökçen Airport Terminal Building, in Istanbul.
More recently, he served as a subject matter expert on seismic isolation and was responsible for seismic isolation design of The Başakşehir Pine and Sakura City Hospital, which is now the largest base-isolated building in the world per Engineering News-Record. The total floor area is 10 million square feet, and it’s supported on 2,068 seismic isolators, making it the largest base-isolated structure both from a building area perspective and the number of seismic isolators. The project received the Award of Merit in Health Care practice from ENR Global Best Projects 2020.
Darama has authored or co-authored over 40 technical publications, including journals and book chapters.
He is an associate member of the TC-12 committee for the SEI ASCE 7-22 Seismic Subcommittee tasked with updating provisions on seismic isolation and energy dissipation systems. He is also an active member of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI).
Darama received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 1993, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in structural engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1995 and 2006, respectively. He is a registered professional engineer and a registered structural engineer in the states of California and Nevada.
