Steven J. Fenves, an ASCE distinguished member and former head of Carnegie Mellon University’s department of civil engineering, a researcher and educator with unusual foresight and innovation in applying computing to structural engineering for many decades, has died. He was 94.
Born in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1931, during World War II Fenves survived the depths of the Holocaust. That trial instilled in Fenves a lifelong pursuit of order and resilience.
Fenves, Ph.D., Dist.M.ASCE, spent some time stationed in what was West Germany as part of U.S. occupation forces, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1954, and earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in civil engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on the G.I. Bill, where he immediately joined the faculty.
In 1962-63, while on sabbatical at MIT, he was part of a team that developed a computer program called STRESS, which has been cited as computational engineering’s Big Bang. The program is widely credited with facilitating structural engineering’s transition into computing.
Fenves was recruited to Carnegie Mellon University in 1972 as head of the civil engineering department, where he led development and growth of education and research into the emerging field of computer-aided engineering. He eventually turned full attention to building its CAE program. At the same time he supervised dozens of graduate students and played a key role in recruitment to grow the program.
Former CMU CEE faculty member Mary Lou Maher, now a UNC Charlotte professor emeritus, had Fenves as her doctorate degree advisor in 1979. “At one of our first meetings, he suggested we look into AI for engineering design,” she said. “Steve was prescient [about] which questions are about to become the most important areas in the world. … [He] treated his students like collaborators.”
A major achievement was Fenves’ central role in the Engineering Design Research Center, funded by the National Science Foundation. The EDRC achieved a broader and deeper understanding of design by applying both cognitive and computer science techniques. Fenves felt that such a center could succeed only in the interdisciplinary culture of CMU.
Another example of Fenves’ vision was in seeing the AISC Specification for Structural Steel Buildings not as dusty rules but as a living, logical circuit. He pioneered the use of decision tables, transforming dense technical information into computable trees. He understood that while steel provides the strength, information provides the stability.
Fenves was author or co-author of six books, over 100 journal articles and book chapters, and over 120 articles and conference papers. A life member of ASCE, Fenves served as guest researcher at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, from 1999 to 2009.
His honors include ASCE’s Huber, Moisseiff, and Winter awards, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UIUC college of engineering, and the Teare and Doherty Award from CMU. Fenves was elected to the National Academy of Engineering at age 45 and served the National Academies for nearly 50 years.
After fully retiring in 2009, he was a survivor-volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., helping others to learn from his experience.
