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As colleagues said in recording and reflecting on Dick’s many accomplishments and the awards and recognition he received throughout his career: “We particularly acknowledge the statesmanlike.

In these and his other administrative roles what came across most memorably was the nature of the man himself. Dick was also an efficient manager of the day-to-day affairs ofthe engineering school. DeFrees Hydraulic Laboratory in honor of its major donor. Dick took the lead in planning, fund-raising, and construction of a 5,000-square- foot addition to the engineering school’s building, a facility that was completed in 1983 and named the Joseph H. When he came into office, the hydraulics research laboratory was small and inadequately equipped. One of the most influential was that of director of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 1978 to 1984. His most outwardly visible accomplishment was in the physical plant. White Instructional Laboratory.Īs is almost inevitable in Academia, a person of Dick’s talent and vision is drawn into administration. It, too, had a successful history and has recently been succeeded by a 21st-century facility founded on the same principles and named in his honor as the Richard N. It was widely successful and had a broad influence on undergraduate education in civil engineering.Īs his research interests started to lean toward concrete structures and the need to appreciate their physical behavior, Dick conceived, designed, and built a structural models laboratory for instruction and research in concrete systems. He was also the lead author of the White, Gergely, and Sexsmith three-volume set of textbooks Structural Engineering (New York: Wiley, 1972), which integrated aspects of mechanics, analysis, behavior, materials, and design. In 1961, Dick joined the Cornell University School of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty as an assistant professor. He was soon recognized as an exceptional teacher, winning the engineering college’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 1965-a promise to be confirmed in later years by the same award in 1996 and as a three-time winner of civil engineering’s Chi Epsilon Award.
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These formative years were the firm base for his later career and his accomplishments asa teacher, a writer, an administrator, a professional leader, and a community servant. They were married in 1957, and Marge completed her undergraduate program while he worked on his doctorate. While studying for the doctorate he worked part time as a structural engineer for a consulting firm and served as an instructor at the university, with responsibility for several undergraduate courses.Īs an undergraduate he had met Margaret Howell, also a student at the university. Army Corps of Engineers, he returned to the University of Wisconsin to study for his Ph.D., which he received in 1961. Then, after six months of active duty service in the U.S. He received his civil engineering education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, earning his B.S. Work on the farms, helping his father in construction, and his classroom interests made civil engineering Dick’s clear choice while still in high school. His father alternated farm ownership with operation of a small contracting firm. friend family Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the Cornell University School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, died on October 3, 2009.ĭick was born on December 21, 1933, in Chetek, Wisconsin, and grew up on several different dairy farms.
