DFI Educational Trust Announces the Establishment of the Clyde N. Baker, Jr. Foundation Engineering Scholarship Fund

The Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) Educational Trust, the charitable arm of DFI, announces the establishment of the Clyde N. Baker, Jr. Foundation Engineering Scholarship Fund.

The fund, which honors Baker’s contributions to the deep foundations industry, will provide scholarships to students enrolled full-time in an undergraduate or graduate civil engineering program at any accredited college or university in the United States. Recipients must demonstrate academic merit, an interest in the area of foundations engineering and financial need.

Clyde N. Baker, Jr., P.E., S.E., is retired after a successful career as senior principal engineer at STS Consultants and later as a senior consultant at GEI Consultants, in Vernon Hills, Illinois. During his career, he served as a geotechnical engineer or consultant on several of the tallest buildings in the world, including four of the tallest in Chicago (the Willis Tower, known as the Sears Building, Trump International Hotel & Tower, the John Hancock Center, and the Amoco Building) as well as Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, Taipei 101 in Taiwan and Burj Khalifa in Dubai. He also worked as a consultant on several supertall buildings, including the Spire in Chicago, Doha Convention Center Tower in Qatar, and Incheon 151 Tower in Korea.

He was a leader in using in-situ testing techniques correlated with past building performance to develop more efficient foundation designs. In the Chicago soil profile, this facilitated economical use of belled caissons on hard pan for major structures of 60 to 70 stories, which normally would have required extending caissons to rock at significant cost premium.

Baker is the recipient of DFI’s Distinguished Service Award; ADSC’s Outstanding Service Award; ASCE’s Thomas A. Middlebrooks, Martin S. Kapp and Ralph B. Peck awards; the 2007 ENR Award of Excellence and ASCE’s Opal Lifetime Achievement Design Award. He received the Washington Award, a prestigious award conferred upon an engineer whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of human kind, and also was chosen by the Geo-Institute of ASCE to present the Terzaghi Lecture in 2009.

Baker received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. degree in physics from William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Bernie Hertlein, DFI Educational Trust trustee and a senior consultant at GEI Consultants, is leading the fundraising drive to raise contributions to the fund.

Donations to the Clyde N. Baker, Jr. Foundation Engineering Scholarship Fund can be made online at www.dfitrust.org.