Elio D'Appolonia

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Elio D'Appolonia , called D'App, (born April 14, 1918 in Coleman, Alberta ; † December 30, 2015 ) was a Canadian-American civil engineer ( geotechnical engineering ).

D'Appolonia grew up in a coal region in Alberta , his father had a construction company. He graduated from the University of Alberta with a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's degree in 1946. He received his doctorate in 1948 at the University of Illinois in structural engineering. He then went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh , where he taught first in structural engineering (where he researched titanium properties) and then in soil mechanics and foundation engineering. Based on his origins in structural engineering, he created an interdisciplinary and creative problem-solving approach to geotechnical engineering, which was a relatively new scientific discipline at the time. In 1956 he founded the engineering office D'Appolonia (E. D'Appolonia Associates, later E. D'Appolonia Consulting Engineers, EDCE) in Pittsburgh, which still exists today and is headquartered in Genoa. 600 employees worked in the engineering office at weddings. D'Apollonia devoted himself entirely to the engineering office and stopped his lectures in the 1950s, but kept in close contact with his university, from which many graduates worked in his engineering office. In 1988 he retired. In the 1980s he also advised STS Consultants (Chicago).

In 1988 he was a Terzaghi Lecturer . He received honorary doctorates from Carnegie-Mellon University (1983) and the University of Genoa (1988). D'Appolonia had been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1977 . In 1991 he received the Pickel Award and in 1969 the Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award of the ASCE, of which he was an honorary member since 1986. He was a founding member of the Geoprofessional Business Association.

He lived in Penn Hills , Pennsylvania with his wife Violet . The couple had five children.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2005
personal data
SURNAME D'Appolonia, Elio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geotechnician
DATE OF BIRTH April 14, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Alberta
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 2015