Robert J. Connor, an assistant professor with the Purdue University School of Civil Engineering and director of the school’s S-BRITE Center, has been selected as the winner of the 2018 AISC T.R. Higgins Lectureship Award. Presented annually, the award recognizes a lecturer and author whose technical paper or papers, published during the eligibility period, are considered an outstanding contribution to engineering literature on fabricated structural steel.

“Rob was nominated for a number of papers, primarily on fatigue and bridge design,” said Larry Kruth, PE, AISC’s vice president of engineering and research. “His papers ‘State-of-the-Art Fracture Characterization I: Master Curve Analysis of Legacy Bridge Steels’ and ‘State-of-the-Art Fracture Characterization II: Correlations between Charpy V-Notch and the Master Curve Reference Temperature,’ both published in the ASCE Journal of Bridge Engineering, were particularly notable to the awards jury.”

Connor has worked in the areas of fatigue, fracture and other issues related to steel bridges for over 20 years. He received the George S. Richardson Medal in 2016 and an AISC Special Achievement Award in 2012, and was the first recipient of the Robert J. Dexter Memorial Lecture Award in 2005.

The Higgins Award will be presented to Connor at the 2018 NASCC: The Steel Conference in Baltimore, taking place April 11-13 (visit www.aisc.org/nascc for more information; registration will open on January 15). For more information about the award, please visit www.aisc.org/higgins.

About the American Institute of Steel Construction

The American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), headquartered in Chicago, is a non-partisan, not-for-profit technical institute and trade association established in 1921 to serve the structural steel design community and construction industry in the United States. Since its establishment, AISC has conducted its numerous activities with a scrupulous sense of public responsibility. For this reason, and because of the high caliber of its staff, the Institute enjoys a close working relationship with architects, engineers, code officials and educators who recognize its professional status in the fields of specification writing, structural research, design development and performance standards.