Greenfield Seymour S. "Steve" Greenfield, former chairman of New York City-based engineering giant Parsons Brinckerhoff and a long-time industry innovator and leader, died on Nov. 17 in Englewood, N.J. He was 84. Cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to a Parsons Brinckerhoff official. Greenfield, who joined PB in 1947, became a company partner in 1964 and served in the chairman role from 1982 until 1989. Even after his official retirement in 1995, he was a presence in the company who "who continued working several days a week" until his death, says current PB Chairman and CEO Thomas J. O'Neill.
August 28, 2006 HDPE vs. RCP, Round 2 By Dr. Patricia D. Galloway Dr. Patricia D. Galloway, PE, is CEO of the Seattle-based Nielsen-Wurster Group. In June she was appointed by President Bush to serve a six-year term as a director of the 24-member National Science Board, the National Science Foundation's governing body. Patricia D. Galloway I have received a surprising number of comments about the recent blog on manufacturer's warranties and specifically, the differences between HDPE pipe and concrete pipe.� As a professional, I thought I'd revisit the issue in light of those comments, which rightly pointed out that
Sixteen students from The City College of New York’s School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture are in an exchange program in Germany this summer at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences. Students from both institutions are developing proposals for proposals for downtown site development, with emphasis on urban design and sustainability. These are their stories. August 8, 2006 Students standing before Berlin city planning model. (Photo by Lisa Wan) On Sustainability By Lisa Wan My name is Lisa Wan. This fall, I will be in thesis at the undergraduate Architecture program of The City College of New York.
June 27 With Comments Like These, No Wonder Women Leave Engineering Patricia D. Galloway Patricia D. Galloway This week I was a co-chair of a most exciting summit on the future of civil engineering, organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers. The room was filled with a Who’s Who in the civil engineering community, including CEOs and executives of the nation’s top engineering design and construction firms, government agencies and universities. About 15% of the attendees were women, including university provosts, engineering deans, CEOs/Presidents and women holding key engineering positions. The summit focused on what the world would look
May 1, 2006 Women At Work, Surrounded by Men Can men in construction ever learn to behave professionally with female colleagues? Ive always been curious about how women cope in the male-dominated construction industry. (About 11% of employed engineers of all kinds are women, according to recent government data.) So I started talking about it over Moroccan food with a couple of friends who had just landed their first jobs doing ADA inspection work for an established engineering firm in Manhattan. They are young, attractive, smart, and female, and are proud to be project engineers. Throughout the night,
April 21, 2006 Students Fight to Build a Green Future On Earth Day 2006, there’s something on the minds of young architects and engineers, and it’s a problem that won’t leave them alone. The challenge to come, they say, is the future of construction and energy practices. And these students, ingrained with problem-solving skills, are using politics to find solutions. Their cause? Sustainability. And students are organizing at the university and national level [] to fight for green building and renewable energy to be instated on their campuses. Throughout the United States, politicians and universities are quickly finding that
Teachers. McAninch, Jahren sponsored class. When he graduates this year, Nels Overgaard, a 22-year-old student at Iowa State University, plans to start up his own construction business. “He’s an entrepreneur,” says Charles T. Jahren, a professor in charge of the school’s construction engineering program. One of Overgaard’s last chances to prepare for the competitive work ahead was a new class that Ames-based Iowa State offered this spring on digital earthmoving. “Everybody knows that GPS is out there, but they don’t always know how it works,” he says. The new project controls are changing the lives of surveyors, engineers and contractors
Inside a small conference room in West Des Moines, Iowa, a high-tech showdown was taking place. At one end of the table sat engineers from the world’s largest equipment builder.
March 8, 2006 "We were laughed at:" A Chat with Constructware�s Scott Unger For many, the idea of owning a business is a life-long dream. But for Scott Unger, the CEO of Constructware, the online collaboration company that is being bought by Autodesk for $46 million, entrepreneurship is an unyielding mindset. At only 42, Unger has taken his Alpharetta, Ga.-based company from infancy to the final stages of its sale to Autodesk, the publicly traded, San Rafael, Calif.-based design software giant. Founded in 1994, Constructware has helped promote the use of online collaboration and project management systems. It
February 23, 2006 A world without engineers? Unthinkable. What do Alfred Nobel and Cindy Crawford have in common- besides the fact that Nobel created dynamite and Crawford happens to be, well, dynamite? They both studied chemical engineering. And really, these two are shining examples of how engineers can improve the quality of our lives, a focus of this year�s National Engineers Week. In all seriousness, recognizing the work of engineers is an important task. Historically, the prosperity and technological advancement of our country has depended upon innovation- and much can be attributed to the work of engineers. And
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