Alumni Spotlight: Caitlin Mueller, MS Structural Engineering '08

Caitlin Mueller (MS ’08 Structural Engineering) describes an academic journey that led to a faculty position at MIT and a return to Stanford CEE as a visiting faculty member this fall.

Since earning her MS in Structural Engineering from Stanford in 2008, Caitlin has carved out a career that bridges engineering, architecture, and computation in truly innovative ways. She began her professional journey at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger in Boston, where she worked on structural designs for a wide range of projects. This early experience not only deepened her technical expertise but also sparked a growing interest in the role of computing and software in design processes.

Motivated to explore this intersection further, Caitlin returned to academia and completed a PhD in Building Technology at MIT in 2014. Her research focused on emerging computational tools that connect architectural creativity with engineering precision – an area that has since become her professional calling. After earning her doctorate, she joined the MIT faculty and founded the Digital Structures research group, which investigates advanced computational approaches for creating high-performing and sustainable buildings.

Under her leadership, the group has produced a broad range of impactful work, from academic publications and open-source software to full-scale prototypes and the formation of two startup companies. In fall 2025, Caitlin returned to Stanford as a Shimizu Visiting Professor, bringing her work full circle in a way that highlights both her professional evolution and her ongoing commitment to education and innovation.

Reflecting on her time at Stanford, Caitlin recalls a pivotal moment in Greg Deierlein’s Advanced Structural Analysis course, where she encountered programming for the first time. Writing MATLAB code to analyze structural systems fundamentally changed the way she thought about problem-solving. That “aha” moment not only reshaped her academic trajectory but also planted the seeds for her future work in computational design.

Coming from an undergraduate background in architecture, Caitlin initially felt like an outsider among her more traditional engineering peers. Yet the openness and support she found in the Stanford CEE community helped her thrive. That formative experience – of bridging disciplines and learning to see problems from multiple perspectives – has continued to shape her career and fuels her collaborative approach to both teaching and research.

Her advice to current students is both simple and profound: “Invest in yourself. Learn from everyone around you – your instructors, classmates, and colleagues. Understand the history of your field, but don’t be afraid to imagine and help create its future.”