Civil engineering historian speaks on ‘great projects’ for Stueck Lecture

Missouri S&T hosted Raymond “Paul” Giroux as the speaker for its 2023 Stueck Lecture. Giroux’s lecture focused on lessons that could be learned from “great projects” for North American infrastructure engineering and construction.

The lecture was held April 14, in Butler-Carlton Civil Engineering Hall and was free and open to the public.

Some of the projects Giroux discussed were the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover Dam, the Eads Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Panama Canal. Giroux is a veteran of the construction industry, and he is also an award-winning civil engineering historian and a 2022 inductee to the National Academy of Construction.

During the lecture, he shared his perspective on these historic and monumental projects, as well as the lessons that can be learned from them.

Giroux made contributions to several large-scale projects throughout his decades of work at Kiewit Corp., such as the Fort McHenry Tunnel in Baltimore, Maryland; the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Span; and multiple projects on the Central Artery/Tunnel Project “Big Dig” in Boston, Massachusetts, such as the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge.

He currently serves as a visiting professor of engineering practice at Purdue University and has served on multiple professional boards and organizations, such as the Transportation Research Board and national committees for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Giroux was presented with the ASCE’s Civil Engineering History and Heritage Award in 2013 and the G. Brooks Earnest Technical Lecture Award in 2016. He was also elected as a Distinguished Member of the society in 2016. In 2017, the ASCE Construction Institute presented him with the organization’s Roebling Award. A 1979 alumnus of Iowa State University’s construction engineering program, he was inducted into his alma mater’s Construction Engineering Hall of Fame in 2018.

This presentation is part of the Neil and Maurita Stueck Distinguished Lecture Series for Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Missouri S&T. Funding for the series was established by Maurita Stueck to honor her late husband, a 1943 civil engineering graduate of S&T, and also provide students with outside perspectives.

The lecture was also part of the 2023 celebration and meetings of the Academy of Civil Engineers. The academy was founded in 1972 to acknowledge outstanding Miner alumni.