Professor Timothy D. Stark has been named a 2024 Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Distinguished Membership is the highest honor bestowed by ASCE and is granted to ASCE Members or Fellows who have attained eminence in their branch of engineering, including the fields of engineering education and construction. Stark is just one of eleven chosen from 150,000 current ASCE members to receive this honor in 2024.
Stark joined the CEE at Illinois faculty in 1991, where he is the Technical Director of the Fabricated Geomembrane Institute (FGI) and a professor of Geotechnical Engineering. His research interests are primarily in the areas of static and seismic stability of natural and manmade slopes, embankments and earth structures. He is currently researching runout analyses for natural and man-made slopes, three-dimensional slope stability analyses, fully softened and residual shear strengths for slope stability analyses, shear strength of liquefied and fine-grained soils for seismic stability analyses, and stability of geosynthetic lined slopes.
Stark has received a number of awards for his research, teaching and service activities. Most recently, he was the recipient of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering’s 2023 J.E. Jennings Award and was named ASCE Geo-Institute Met Section’s 2023 Martin S. Kapp Lecturer. Other accolades include: 2022-2023 ASCE Cross-USA Lecturer; 2022 T.H. Wu Lecturer at The Ohio State University; 2019 ASCE George H. Norman Medal; Best Paper in Geosynthetics International Journal, 2016; 2015 James M. Hoover Lecturer at Iowa State University; ASCE Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award, 2013 and 1998; and Associate Editor Award from the ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering, 2012.
The new class of Distinguished Members will be inducted during ASCE’s Annual Convention in Tampa, October 7, 2024.