The Grainger College of Engineering

Bruce R. Ellingwood

Bruce R. Ellingwood
Bruce R. Ellingwood
For leadership in the development of reliability-based design standards for structural codes, development of the new field of structural reliability and probabilistic approaches, and educating generations of engineers and professors.

Raymond Allen Jones Chair, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

  • BS, 1968, Civil Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • MS, 1969, Civil Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • PhD, 1972, Civil Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

An accomplished researcher, teacher, and administrator, Bruce Ellingwood is internationally recognized as an authority on structural load modeling, reliability,and risk analysis of engineered facilities.  He is a leader in the technical development and implementation of probability based codified design standards for building structures.

Ellingwood’s service to civil engineering professional organizations and research leading to the introduction of safety and risk standards in the United States have been instrumental in the design of safer infrastructure.  As Administrator of the Secretariat of the American National Standard Committee A58 on Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures from 1977-84, he directed the development of the probability-based load criteria for limit states design that now appear in ASCE Standard 7 on Minimum Design Loads, the AISC Specification for Structural Steel Buildings, ASCE Standard 16 on LRFD for Engineered Wood Construction, ACI Standard 318 on Structural Concrete, and both national Model Building Codes.

He began his career as a research structural engineer for the Naval Ship Research and Development Center.  He spent 11 years at the National Bureau of Standards, serving as head of the structural engineering group from 1982-86.  A noted professor at several leading institutions over the past 27 years, Ellingwood currently holds the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair at Johns Hopkins and currently serves as Raymond Jones Chair at Georgia Tech.

Among his numerous awards and recognitions, Ellingwood is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineering, and an inaugural Fellow of the ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2002.