Corps Realigns Officers, Role Seen on Trump Wall
Maj. Gen. Michael C. Wehr on April 14 was named as the deputy chief of engineers and deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Leading its Mississippi Valley Division since 2014, he now succeeds Maj. Gen. Richard L. Stevens as Corps second in command. Lt. Gen. Todd T. Semonite was named commanding general in 2016. Replacing Wehr is Maj. Gen. Richard G. Kaiser, who led the Combined Security Transition Command in Afghanistan.
In another key appointment, Maj. Gen. Anthony C. Funkhouser becomes deputy commanding general for military and international operations. He now is commander of the Army Center for Initial Military Training, at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. John Doyle, special counsel with law and lobbying firm Jones Walker LLP, says Wehr and Funkhouser are Corps “up-and-comers.”
Among other Corps elevations, Brig. Gen. Diana M. Holland becomes commanding general of the South Atlantic Division, based in Atlanta. She was commandant of U.S. Military Academy cadets. Pacific Ocean Division commander Brig. Gen. Peter B. Andrysiak Jr. moves to deputy commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division. Brig. Gen. David C. Hill shifts to become commander of the Corps Transatlantic Division, based in Winchester, Va., responsible for construction in the Middle East and central Asia, among other locations.
Semonite and the new Corps officers will face a civil-works program that “will be a resource challenge, almost certainly,” says Bruce Berwick, a Washington, D.C., consultant and former Corps division commander. He and Doyle expect President Donald Trump’s long-awaited $1-trillion infrastructure plan to include some Corps civil-works projects. The locations and timing of projects remain sketchy, but locks and dams will be in the mix, says Doyie, a former top Army civil-works official. While the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security appears to be taking the lead to oversee Trump’s touted U.S.-Mexico border wall, Doyle sees a Corps role on the project. The first test of the wall’s viability will come in a spending bill to fund the government past April 28, the deadline for a stopgap 2017 appropriations measure. Trump sought to have included $1.4 billion for the border project, but some lawmakers balked at that.
Milton S.F. Curry will join the University of Southern California School of Architecture as dean on July 1. He had been associate dean for academic affairs and strategic initiatives at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Curry is the founder of Critical Productive Journal, a national academic publication focused on scholarship and creative work in architecture, urbanism and cultural theory. Curry succeeds Qingyun Ma, who served two five-year terms as dean and will remain on the architecture school faculty.
Carrie Matlock has been elevated to president of DLA Architects Ltd., Itasca, Ill. A company veteran, she was named its first woman partner in 2007, after having been a vice president. Matlock succeeds Bruce Dahlquist, who retired earlier this year. In its latest rankings, Architectural Record magazine named the company among the Top 300 architecture firms.
AECOM has named Vern Kuehn as executive vice president and general manager of what the company says is a newly created federal business unit within its construction services group. Most recently, he led the federal construction business of Kiewit Corp. as a senior vice president. Keuhn is a former president and board member of the Associated General Contractors chapter in metro Washington, D.C. He now is based in Arlington, Va.
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Wendy Van Wickle has joined Parsons Corp. as an executive vice president within its federal business unit. Now based in Centreville, Va., she had been vice president of ground operations and logistics solutions for consultant Leidos, a role in which Parsons says she was responsible for about $350 million in revenue in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S.
Michael Baker International has promoted Bonnie D. Shepherd to executive vice president and chief practice officer. Based in Baltimore, she joined in 2016 as senior vice president as well as national lead of rail-transit practice. Also, Shepherd was a vice president at SYSTRA USA and at Hatch Mott McDonald.
Houston-based Rice University has named Reginald DesRoches as dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, effective on July 1. He is currently chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, specializing in research on design of resilient infrastructure systems under extreme loads and application of smart and adaptive materials, says the school. DesRoches, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, served as technical leader for the U.S. response to its 2010 earthquake. He also is a board member of the National Academies’ Resilient America Roundtable. The engineering school has about 1,500 undergraduate and 950 graduate students.
Engineer and CM firm Fishbeck, Thompson, Carr & Huber Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich., has elevated Senior Vice Presidents Kamran Qadeer and John Willemin to principal. Qadeer is a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Michigan section, and Willemin is the current state section chair of the American Water Works Association.
