Editor’s Note

Each year, the ASCE Technical Council on Forensic Engineering (TCFE) selects one paper published in the Journal the previous calendar year for our Outstanding Paper Award. The 2008 Outstanding Paper Award recipients are Steven J. DelloRusso, Gunjeet Juneja, Brent A. Gabby, and Donald O. Dusenberry. The four authors are members of Simpson Gumpertz and Heger Inc. (SGH), a national engineering firm headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. The firm designs, investigates, and rehabilitates structures and building enclosures.

DelloRusso, Juneja, Gabby, and Dusenberry’s paper, “Monitoring and Repair of the Milwaukee City Hall Masonry Tower,” appeared in the July/August 2008 issue (Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 197–206). This was a special topic issue titled Assessment and Evaluation of Existing Structures by Means of In Situ Load Testing and Structural Monitoring. The selected paper illustrates well the skills forensic engineers can bring to ensuring sustainability of the infrastructure—the conservation of culturally significant buildings. The Journal Publications Committee noted that the paper is timely and well presented, with excellent illustrations. It is also useful to practicing engineering consultants, the principal readership of the Journal. Award plaques and certificates will be presented to the award recipients, and they will be recognized at the 5th ASCE Forensic Engineering Congress to be held in Washington, D.C., in November 2009.

Steven J. DelloRusso (Fig. 1) specializes in investigations of the structural and mechanical systems of buried and above-ground structures. He has extensive testing experience including destructive and nondestructive testing for material properties, in situ load testing of structural components, and vibration testing. In his $20+$ year career with SGH, he has specified, configured, installed, and maintained numerous systems to monitor and record service load conditions and their effects on structures. DelloRusso has configured systems to remotely measure short- and long-term deflections in large-diameter buried plastic pipe (including dynamic vehicular live load effects), crack movements within operating water filtration tanks, and structural vibrations due to adjacent construction activities such as pile driving and blasting. He is a member of the Standards Committee of the International Society of Explosives Engineers, responsible for creating industry standards such as the recently adopted Field Practice Guidelines for Blasting Seismographs. DelloRusso has a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and is a registered professional engineer in the state of Massachusetts.

Gunjeet Juneja (Fig. 2) has been involved in analysis, design, and evaluation of a wide range of structures and structural components such as elevated tanks including fluid/structure interaction, large-diameter buried structures, bridges, precision structures (antennas and telescopes), historic masonry buildings, plates, and shell structures. She has over nine years of experience in modeling complex problems related to analysis, structural evaluation, and collapse and failure investigation of structures using sophisticated and advanced finite-element analysis software packages such as ABAQUS and NASTRAN. Juneja received her B.E. in civil engineering from Punjab Technical University, India, and an M.S. in structural engineering from Tufts University. She is a registered professional engineer in the state of California.

Brent A. Gabby (Fig. 3) is a senior principal at SGH with more than twenty years of experience in building investigation, design, and repair of contemporary and historic structures. He has worked on culturally significant buildings such as museums, educational facilities, religious structures, and municipal buildings throughout the United States. The expertise he gained working with a variety of structures and materials provided him with the expertise and knowledge to successfully complete projects such as the restoration of Milwaukee City Hall. Gabby lectures at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining SGH, he worked at 2618 Broadway Restoration and The Brick Industry Association. Gabby holds a B. of S. in architectural engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and an M.A. in archeology and in conservation studies from the University of York in England. He is a member of the Association for Preservation Technology and the Masonry Society, and is a licensed professional engineer in ten states.

Donald O. Dusenberry (Fig. 4) specializes in analysis and design of buildings, mechanical structures, and component structures. He is an investigator of structural failure, damage, and deterioration, both for remedial design and forensic testimony. Dusenberry has extensive experience in laboratory and field testing, sophisticated analysis techniques, building code and standards development, and project management. As a senior principal at SGH, he is a key contributor to the firm’s practice in engineering for extreme environments, including fire, blast, and progressive-collapse resistance. Dusenberry is a fellow of ASCE. He chairs the committee that maintains the ASCE standard, Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures, which is adopted by the International Code Council for the International Building Code. He also chairs a committee that is developing the first-ever commercial standard for blast-resistant design of buildings. Dusenberry is past-chair of the ASCE Technical Activities Division Executive Committee and the Performance of Structures Technical Administrative Committee. He serves on the Structural Engineering Institute Administrative Committee on Continuing Education, and the American Concrete Institute Committee on Fire Resistance and Fire Protection of Structures. In October 2009, he will begin his term on the Board of Governors of the Structural Engineering Institute.

Dusenberry has published over 40 articles on topics related to fire resistance, blast resistance, performance of structures in distress, and other technical topics. He has served as an editor of technical publications and as an associate editor of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. He is a coauthor of handbooks on forensic structural engineering and structural condition assessment, and a best-practices guide for prevention of progressive collapse. He presently is editor of an upcoming book on blast-resistant design and a coauthor for a new best-practices guide for designing for fire resistance.

Other nominees for the Outstanding Paper Award were:

Congratulations are extended to each of these authors. Nominations submitted by Journal readers were appreciated.