Samantha Rawlings

LEED AP BD+C

Samantha joined Westside Acoustics & Vibration Engineering in 2025 and brings eighteen years of experience as an acoustician, consultant, and project manager to the team. Samantha’s project portfolio is diverse, including projects from every major sector. Samantha has worked on educational, hospitality, housing, governmental, fitness, performing arts/music, commercial, and environmental projects.  

Her personal philosophy is that her engineering responsibility to clients is to advise them both regarding what mitigation is needed and what mitigation is not needed. Balanced acoustical design is key in Samantha’s approach to client service. 

Samantha holds a certificate in project management from UCLA’s Extension program, an unusual qualification within the acoustical community. Samantha undertook formal training in project management to facilitate successful project delivery to clients. She used these skills to transform traditional project and portfolio management practices. These efforts resulted in improved project tracking, improved task tracking, and better workload management, which facilitated the ability for project managers to be proactive. 

Samantha is an active participant in codes and standards committees. In 2018, Samantha sponsored a successful change to the International Building Code that expanded impact sound isolation protection for residential occupants to be copacetic with code protections for airborne sound isolation. This change is significant in that the International Building Code is widely adopted across all fifty states. Additionally, Samantha is a member of the ASTM E33 Committee for Building and Environmental Acoustics. She served as technical contact to develop the new high- and low-frequency impact standards, addressing and resolving committee member concerns to publish standards E3222 and E3207. Their publication made the new metrics available to the design and construction community. She is now vice-chair for E33.03 and technical contact for E966. 

Along with co-authors John LoVerde, Wayland Dong, and others, Samantha has produced original acoustical research and presented at conferences within the U.S. and the U.K. Samantha was instrumental in development of a repeatable measurement method for heavy weight impacts. Samantha pursued evaluation of heavy-soft impact sources in addition to the heavy-hard sources, which are typically the focus, finding that they are unique and warrant consideration. Additionally, Samantha and the Westside team undertook evaluation of vehicular noise sources through years-long monitoring in order to develop statistical methods for defining hourly average sound levels and short-duration event levels. This work is meaningful to the design and construction community due to the increase in new criteria for the same in spite of the absence of any such standardized definition. Participating in original work keeps Samantha engaged in the science and joy of acoustics, while deepening her expertise to meet client needs.

Education

B.S. Acoustical Engineering: University of Hartford

Certificate in Project Management

University of California Los Angeles

Affiliations

Acoustical Society of America

ASTM, E33 Technical Committee for Building & Environmental Acoustics

Collaborative for High Performance Schools, IEQ Co-Chair

Awards

ASTM E33 Special Recognition Award, 2021

ASTM E33 Special Recognition Award, 2023