Two members of the civil and environmental engineering faculty have been awarded faculty scholar appointments.
Professor Larry Fahnestock has been named the Siess Faculty Scholar. Fahnestock has been on the CEE at Illinois faculty since 2006, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in behavior and design of steel structures and building systems.
Fahnestock’s research focuses on development and implementation of innovative large-scale structural systems for buildings and bridges that provide robust long-term performance under service loads, and life safety and resilience when subjected to extreme loads. His projects employ large-scale laboratory experiments, field monitoring and numerical simulations, and he is the incoming Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory.
The Siess Faculty Scholar position is funded by the Chester P. and Helen K. Siess Endowed Fund in Civil Engineering, established in 1991. Chester P. Siess (MS 1939, PhD 1948) was a faculty member in CEE from 1949-1978. He served as Head of the department from 1973-1978, after which he retired as Professor Emeritus. During his career, Siess’ educational and research activity centered on the development of modern codes and standards. His published work was directed to practical applications for improving our understanding of the behavior of reinforced and prestressed concrete elements in bridges and buildings.
Chester P. Siess died in 2004. His wife, Helen, died in 1997.
Associate professor Jeremy S. Guest has been named the David C. Crawford Faculty Scholar. Guest has been on the CEE faculty since 2011, where he teaches courses in the Environmental Engineering and Science area and the Energy-Water-Environment-Sustainability program.
Guest’s research focuses on the development of technologies for sustainable water, sanitation, biofuels and bioproducts with applications in both high-income and underserved communities. In addition to his role at CEE, he currently serves as the Associate Director for Research for the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at UIUC, the Sustainable Design Lead for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, and the Illinois lead for the Sustainability Thrust of the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute.
David C. Crawford (MS 54) was born in Dixon, Ill., in 1930. Before coming to the University of Illinois for a graduate degree in civil engineering, he completed his bachelor’s degree at Norwich University in Vermont in 1952. He later went on to be awarded an honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from Norwich University in 1993. After graduation from UIUC, Crawford served in the Army Corps of Engineers (1954-1956). His approximately 40-year engineering career culminated in his retirement as Executive Vice President of Marathon Letourneau in Houston, Texas. In 2011, Crawford and his wife, Carolyn, established an endowment fund at UIUC, which supports the David C. Crawford Faculty Scholar position.
David Crawford died in 2018. Carolyn Crawford died in 2013.