UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Institution of Structural Engineers recently announced that Amr Elnashai, Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Penn State’s College of Engineering, is the recipient of the 2017 Keith Eaton Award.
“The institution is not only my professional society, but has been part and parcel of my career since the early 1980s,” said Elnashai. “For this and several other reasons, I was very pleased to receive notice of this award. My Ph.D. adviser, Patrick Dowling, was president of the institution in the past, as well as many other colleagues and friends who are fellows, medals/awards winners, and in leadership positions there.”
Created in 2009 to honor the institution’s past chief executive, Keith Eaton, the award recognizes dedicated, valuable, outstanding or exceptional personal contributions toward the advancement of the institution’s international interests.
Specifically, Elnashai has hosted the institution’s successive presidents as well as the chief executive, Martin Powell, on visits to various civil engineering departments around the United States — including Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Penn State and Texas A&M University — to engage undergraduate and graduate structures students with the institution. He is preparing to host the current president, Ian Firth, and Powell at Virginia Tech in September 2017.
“Through these visits, we have raised the awareness of structural engineering faculty and students at top U.S. universities of the outstanding work of the Institution of Structural Engineers, which is the largest society of its type in the world, with over 27,000 members in 105 countries,” said Elnashai.
A Fellow of the British Royal Academy of Engineering, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Institution of Structural Engineers, Elnashai is the founder and co-editor of the leading Journal of Earthquake Engineering, which has been published for 20 years.