Dr. Mohammed Ettouney is the second Weidlinger principal to receive the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Homer Gage Balcom Award, named for the engineer of Empire State building.

NEW YORK, NY – Dr. Mohammed M. Ettouney was presented with the Homer Gage Balcom Award at the 43rd annual dinner dance and awards presentation of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Metropolitan Section, held at Tavern on the Green on June 13th. The award is presented biennially to “an individual who has demonstrated a lifetime of excellence in the structural engineering of buildings, along with advances in the state-of-the-art, and a commitment to the advancement of the structural engineering profession.” ASCE describes Balcom (1870-1938) as “the structural engineer of several New York City skyscrapers—including the Empire State Building—and a pioneer in designing tall structures to account for lateral wind forces.”

Dr. Raymond P. Daddazio, President and CEO of Weidlinger Associates, said, “Mohammed is truly deserving of this significant honor. His contributions to Weidlinger and to the profession are impressive, and his dedication to learning and sharing his knowledge is critical to the continuing growth of our industry. Weidlinger is especially proud that two of the seven Balcom recipients have been Weidlinger principals and that the values of innovation, community service, and technical excellence are being passed down to future generations.” (Weidlinger founder Mario G. Salvadori was the first recipient of the award in 1996).

As recent president of ASCE’s Architectural Engineering Institute (AEI) and the leader of numerous symposiums in New York and throughout the country, Dr. Ettouney has taken ownership of a multidisciplinary, multi-hazard approach to the health and safety of structures. He continues to inspire individuals from the various built environment professions—who commonly tend to their own concerns—to work more closely in defining and exploiting a global viewpoint towards structures, especially as it relates to safety and preventive maintenance. Heavily involved in the economics, life cycle costs, and cost benefits of structural health monitoring, Ettouney is co-author of a soon-to-be-published book, Structural Health in Civil Engineering, which argues for ensuring that structures do not degrade, fail, or require expensive retrofits through lack of attention at the beginning or throughout their life spans. He views structures much as a doctor who believes in preventive medicine views the human body, urging that it is wiser and more cost-efficient to head off sickness before it takes root. His goal is to replace what he calls the “5% solution” of paying attention only when something bad happens with a more activist agenda.

In nominating Dr. Ettouney, Anil Kumar Agrawal, Professor of Structural Engineering at the City College of the City University of New York, stated that “in my frank opinion, it will be difficult to find a person more qualified” and that “his contribution to the state-of-the-art is simply excellent and rare indeed.” Dr. Ettouney has more than 38 years of experience in conventional structural engineering and hazard-related disciplines, including earthquake engineering, blast engineering, vibration and acoustic mitigation, soil mechanics and dynamics, and structural health engineering. He has published more than 275 papers and contributed to five books on these subjects. Dr. Ettouney was one of the writers of the first NYC-specific seismic design code (1995) and is on the steering committee for development of a second-generation performance-based seismic design code (ATC-58), under FEMA sponsorship. At Weidlinger, he has worked on structural acoustics and submerged systems, introducing the use of scale-independent elements for mid-range frequency analysis (1991) and a probabilistic boundary element method (1987); He recently published a new theory of progressive collapse.

Dr. Ettouney is an active member of the American Society of Non-Destructive Testing (ASNT) and the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). He was recently designated a Fellow of the AEI and is currently a member or chair of several ASCE, ASNT, and AISC committees. He is a licensed Professional Engineer and has been with Weidlinger Associates since 1984. He has a BS in civil engineering (1969), MS in structural engineering (1972) from Cairo University, ScD in structural mechanics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1976), and MBA from Long Island University (1980).

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) was originally founded in New York City in 1852 and represents more than 140,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide; it is America’s oldest national engineering society. The Metropolitan Section is part of Region 1 of ASCE and consists of all five New York City boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island), Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, and Rockland and Westchester counties in the Lower Hudson Valley. With more than 4,000 members, the Met Section is one of the largest and most active sections in the country. Past recipients of the Balcom Award are: 2006, Ysrael A. Seinuk; 2004, Irwin G. Cantor; 2002, George J. Tamaro; 2000, Leslie E. Robertson; 1998, Charles Thornton; and 1996, Mario G. Salvadori.