STRATAEngineered to stand · Optimised to build
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About Strata

An international engineering practice founded on three decades of structural authority. Code-agnostic, judgement-led, and built around a single conviction: a structure should be engineered to stand, and optimised to build.

Our story · independent by design

Three decades of structural and seismic engineering, distilled into one independent standard of judgement, and one conviction: a structure should be engineered to stand, and optimised to build.

Strata Engineering Solutions is an independent structural engineering practice serving the Gulf from offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We bring more than thirty years of structural and earthquake engineering to a single question that sits behind every project: is this structure safe, code-compliant, and genuinely buildable.

That experience is not theoretical. Across the careers behind the practice, our principals and engineers have designed, reviewed and assessed over a thousand projects, and worked fluently across six code jurisdictions. We are deliberately code-agnostic: the right code is the one the project and its jurisdiction demand, and we move between them without losing rigour.

We are best known for one role: independent design review. When a structure must be right, an owner, authority or insurer needs a conflict-free second opinion on the analysis, the load path and the seismic and wind models. Our Category III checking in Dubai and Abu Dhabi closes that gap with a stamped, defensible report.

Independence is only half of what we offer. The other half is buildability. An elegant structure no contractor can afford to build has failed at its job, so we optimise the structure not only to stand but to be built economically, and that edge runs through everything we design.

By the numbers · track record
30+Years of structural & seismic experience
1000+Projects delivered, reviewed or assessed
30+Engineers across the practice
6Code jurisdictions mastered
What we stand on

Independent. Code-agnostic. Buildable.

Three principles run through every review, every model and every drawing we put our name to.

Principle 01
Independence first
Our review work is conflict-free by design. We verify the load path, the seismic and wind models and the analysis on its own terms, then stamp a report we can defend.
Principle 02
Judgement, not just software
The analysis runs in-house, but the calls are made by senior engineers. Models inform the decision. They do not replace the engineer who signs it.
Principle 03
Built to be built
We design to the optimum steel tonnage and rationalise members into repeating families, so the contractor reuses formwork and the client sees it in the budget.
Leadership

Judgement you can put your name next to.

Two principals lead the practice: one carrying its technical and seismic authority, the other its strategy and delivery. Behind them, an in-house engineering team of more than thirty does the analytical work.

Prof. Dr Qaisar Ali

Founder & Technical Principal
1,000+ Engineers trained & mentored

A structural and earthquake engineer with more than thirty years of practice, research and teaching, over which he has trained and mentored more than 1,000 engineers. He holds a PhD in structural engineering and has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers (over 1,000 citations and an h-index of 18 on Scopus) in leading international journals such as Earthquake Spectra and the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering, alongside contributions to internationally published books. He built the fourth-largest seismic testing facility in the world. His career is built at the intersection of seismic design, retrofit and forensic investigation. His specialism is performance-based seismic engineering — assessing how a structure behaves beyond the elastic range, and strengthening it so that critical buildings keep functioning when it matters most. As Technical Principal, he sets the standard the practice reviews and designs to.

PhD Structural Engineering · EN 1998 · ASCE 41
International affiliations — American Society of Civil Engineers (USA) · Earthquake Engineering Research Institute — World Housing Encyclopedia editorial board (USA) · Building Research Institute (Japan) · ACECOMS, AIT (Thailand)

Dr Muhammad Hassan Khan

Chief Executive Officer

Leads Strata as Chief Executive Officer, with responsibility for the firm's strategy, its client relationships and its design-build delivery. He pairs senior engineering understanding with a disciplined, internationally-benchmarked model for how projects are won, run and handed over. His focus is the client's whole journey: scoping the right engagement, structuring single-point delivery where it removes risk, and making sure the practice's independence and buildability edge translate into outcomes a client can measure.

Strategy & leadership · Client partner · Design-build delivery
International collaboration

Built on international practice.

The careers behind Strata have delivered projects with and for international development organisations, donor agencies and engineering consultancies. That exposure shapes how we work: to global standards, with documentation and independence that hold up to outside scrutiny.

World Bank
Asian Development Bank
GIZ · Germany
USAID
UNDP
UN-Habitat
JICA · Japan
Children Without Borders (KnK) · Japan
Swiss Development Cooperation
Mott MacDonald · UK
IMC · UK
EERI · World Housing Encyclopedia

Collaboration and project experience across the practice's team. Logos shown on request, subject to usage rights.

Codes & standards

Six jurisdictions, one standard of rigour.

We apply whichever code the project and its jurisdiction demand, and move between them without losing rigour.

Concrete
EN 1992 ACI 318 BS 8110
Steel
EN 1993 AISC 360 BS 5950
Loading
ASCE 7 IBC EN 1991
Seismic
EN 1998 ASCE 41 Performance-based

Work with a practice that checks the structure, and the cost of building it.

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