Thomas Paulay OBE OoM (26 May 1923 – 28 June 2009) was a Hungarian-New Zealand earthquake engineer.
Trained as chemical engineer, after fleeing Hungary to West Germany, Paulay arrived in New Zealand in 1951,[1] and became a naturalised New Zealand citizen in 1957.
[2] After a PhD 'The coupling of shear walls',[3] in 1961, he joined the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Canterbury, where he spent many years studying the seismic behaviour and design of structures.
[1][4][5] In the 1986 Queen's Birthday Honours, Paulay was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to civil engineering.
[6] Paulay delivered the fourth Mallet–Milne memorial lecture for the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics, in London in 1993.