Ellingwood Receives Alumni Award for Distinguished Service

Bruce R. Ellingwood (BS 68, MS 69, PhD 72) received the Alumni Award for Distinguished Service by the College of Engineering on Saturday, April 20, 2013. He was recognized for his leadership in the development of reliability-based design standards for structural codes, development of the new field of structural reliability and probabilistic approaches, and participation in educating generations of engineers and professors. Ellingwood currently serves as the Raymond Allen Jones Chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.

An accomplished researcher, teacher, and administrator, Bruce Ellingwood is internationally recognized as an authority on structural load modeling, reliability, and risk analysis of engineered facilities. He is a leader in the technical development and implementation of probability based codified design standards for building structures.

Ellingwood's service to civil engineering professional organizations and research leading to the introduction of safety and risk standards in the United States have been instrumental in the design of safer infrastructure. As Administrator of the Secretariat of the American National Standard Committee A58 on Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures from 1977-84, he directed the development of the probability-based load criteria for limit states design that now appear in ASCE Standard 7 on Minimum Design Loads, the AISC Specification for Structural Steel Buildings, ASCE Standard 16 on LRFD for Engineered Wood Construction, ACI Standard 318 on Structural Concrete, and both national Model Building Codes. 

He began his career as a research structural engineer for the Naval Ship Research and Development Center. He spent 11 years at the National Bureau of Standards, serving as head of the structural engineering group from 1982-86. Over the past 27 years, he has taught at several leading institutions including Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Tech, where he currently works now.

Among his numerous awards and recognitions, Ellingwood is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineering, and an inaugural Fellow of the ASCE's Structural Engineering Institute. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2002.