Ryan with his wife Maria and their daughter Haley on a trip to Osaka, Japan.
As a product evaluation engineer in our Wood Products Lab, Ryan Kellberg doesn’t just look at technical specs and spreadsheets — he helps break things. On purpose.
“It’s been fun to watch shear walls shake until they bust apart,” says Ryan, who joined Weyerhaeuser earlier this year. “That’s not something I got to do in my previous roles, where the goal was to make things that don’t break!”
Those previous roles included a decade in structural design consulting and forensic engineering. Now, Ryan applies his strong foundational understanding of how materials perform in real-world applications to define the design strengths engineers use to build safer, more efficient structures with our engineered wood products.
GET TO KNOW RYAN
What do you do as a product evaluation engineer?
I work on the Product Engineering team in our Wood Products Lab in Federal Way, Washington. I help set design strength values for our structural wood products, monitor trends in our product quality, investigate the effects of potential changes to products we already produce and test/develop potential new product ideas. I get to see products tested in real time, watch how they perform and translate that into guidance engineers can use.
It’s been great to get more hands-on and understand the theory behind the numbers I used in design work. This role gives me a much deeper understanding of how our products actually behave under stress, and how we help shape the standards for the entire industry.
How do you explain Weyerhaeuser to your friends and family?
Some of my friends may not know the company name, but if I show them a picture of an I-joist, they know exactly what it is. I usually say my team figures out how much our structural products can hold and how engineers can safely design with them.
But my family has a long history with Weyerhaeuser. My great-grandfather and other relatives worked as loggers in the 1920s and '30s, so it’s fun to continue their legacy in a different way. I’ve always respected Weyerhaeuser’s long presence in the Pacific Northwest. Once I got here, I saw that we do things the right way, even if it may put us at a short-term disadvantage. We don’t cut corners, and we actively try to steer the industry in the right direction.
What’s been your favorite project so far?
Definitely the shear wall project we just recently wrapped up. It was fun because we were discovering new things as the project progressed. There’s a lot of hands-on testing. Breaking things and observing what happens tells us a lot about the products and what changes we can make to improve them.
It’s a very investigative process. We started by trying to answer a simple question, and it unfolded from there. It was great as one of my first projects because it played to my strengths with something I had prior experience in, while at the same time teaching me a lot.
What do you want to learn more about?
This is my first job in testing, so I’m diving into the standards we use to test and evaluate our products and monitoring quality assurance testing to evaluate the long-term trends of the products we make. I’ve learned a ton, but there’s still so much more to understand. Everyone’s quick to help and excited to share their knowledge — it really feels like a team environment.
Have there been any surprises?
I didn’t realize how involved we are in shaping industry standards. We’re at the table with other manufacturers and code developers, making sure the right practices are followed.
What’s most different from your previous work?
The environment. I used to work in offices or remotely, and now I’m in a big lab surrounded by testing equipment and machines. Also, I’m doing way more statistics than ever before, which has been a great challenge.
