CEE alumni receieve Distinguished
Service Awards
The College of Engineering celebrated its
57th annual ENGINEERS' DAY on Oct. 22. Two outstanding CEE alumni, Arthur
F. Hawnn and John D. Osteraas, were chosen for honors based on their
contribution to the engineering profession, the College of Engineering
and society as a whole.
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Arthur F. Hawnn,
Senior Civil Engineer and Project Manager, U.S. Department of
Defense, CIEWR
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 rowing up in South Korea, Arthur
Hawnn studied English with the hope one day of traveling to the
United States. During the Korean War, he put his studies to good use,
serving as an interpreter on the front lines of the conflict for the
U.S. Marine Corps. Hawnn caught the attention of Capt. Arthur Peterson,
a Marine company commander who was also UW-Eau Claire professor as well
as a state lawmaker. Peterson encouraged Hawnn to travel to the United
States to study, and sponsored a legislative scholarship that paid for
Hawnn’s tuition.
Hawnn enrolled at UW-Madison in 1955, and took an
interest in civil engineering. He worked his way through college, sometimes
holding as many as four jobs at one time to help defray his expenses.
Among his jobs: spending fall afternoons scraping off the opaque coating
that plant pathologists at the university painted on greenhouses to
shade plants from the summer sun.
Hawnn graduated from UW-Madison with a BS in civil
engineering in 1959, and went on to earn his MS (1960) and PhD (1962)
from the university in civil engineering.
In 1962, Hawnn founded his own company—Arthur
F. Hawnn International—in Springfield, Virginia. The company provides
consulting work in areas such as transportation, urban development,
and water resources management.
Since 1974, Hawnn has worked for the U.S. Department
of Defense, where he has worked on transportation projects, design and
construction of facilities, and systems development. He currently serves
as a senior civil engineer and project manager for the Department of
Defense. He has won nine awards from the Department of the Army for
his outstanding performance on projects, and is a member of the American
Society for Civil Engineers.
In 2002, Hawnn established a $2 million charitable
remainder trust that will help finance two professorships in the Department
of Civil & Environmental Engineering. The first, the Peterson-Rader-Hawnn
Professorship in Civil & Environmental Engineering, honors Marine
Capt. Peterson and his wife, Connie, CEE Professor Lloyd Rader and his
wife, Helen, and Hawnn’s parents. The second, the Arthur F. Hawnn
Professorship in Transportation, was established to honor Hawnn’s
work in the transportation field and encourage other alumni to remember
their obligations to the university.
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John D. Osteraas,
Practice Dierctor and Principal Engineer, Exponent Failure Analysis
Associates
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 or John Osteraas, more
than two decades of engineering expertise came to the fore in the wake
of the national tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Osteraas, a principal engineer
with Exponent Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park, California,
was deployed to Ground Zero as a lead structures specialist with FEMA’s
Urban Search and Rescue program and subsequently led an investigation
into the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Osteraas is one
of the world’s leading experts on the performance of structures
under extreme loading or stress, and his work with Exponent Failure
Analysis Associates played a crucial role in understanding the causes
of the collapse and the extent of the damage.
Osteraas and Exponent Failure Analysis also played
significant roles in assessing the damage and structural failures resulting
from the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, earthquakes
in Mexico and California, and the construction collapse of the L’Ambiance
Plaza lift-slab building in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He currently manages
a project for the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake
Engineering aimed at developing engineering guidelines for the assessment
and repair of earthquake damage in wood frame construction.
Osteraas enrolled at UW-Madison in 1971, egged on
by a bet from his mother following what he described as a boring junior
year in high school. He had an interest in art and anthropology, and
soon discovered he had little talent for either subject. He dropped
out of college and worked in construction, a field he enjoyed.
Family friend Frank Worzala, a professor in the college’s
Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, encouraged Osteraas
to consider engineering. He re-enrolled at the university, with Professor
Worzala’s help landed a part-time job at the Forest Products Laboratory,
and quickly fell under the tutelage of noted Civil Engineering Professor
Chuck Salmon.
He received his BS in civil engineering from UW-Madison
in 1976. Osteraas moved on to Stanford University, where he received
both his MS (1977) and his PhD (1990) in civil engineering.
Osteraas joined Exponent Failure Analysis Associates
in 1982 after stints as a research engineer for Structural Research,
Inc., of Middleton, Engineering Research, Inc., of Madison, and Marshall
Erdman and Associates of Madison.
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