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PRIVATE PRACTICE
Dr. Blume's first engineering job, while he was still an undergraduate student, was with the Seismological Division of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (forerunner of the U.S.G.S.). In 1935 and 1936 he worked as a construction engineer on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Later he worked for the Standard Oil Company of California and the structural engineering design firm of H.J. Brunnier.
In 1945, Dr. Blume established John A. Blume and Associates (JAB), which soon became the preeminent consulting firm in structural and earthquake engineering. In 1970, his firm merged with the URS Corporation, forming URS/John A. Blume and Associates (now URS/Greiner). JAB designed or analyzed scores of special earthquake projects, among them the two-mile long Stanford Linear Accelerator, the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, the restoration of the California State Capitol, and the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Other projects included the first man-made offshore island for oil production (near Ventura, California), the supersonic wind tunnel at Moffet Field, earthquake research on school buildings for the California Division of Architecture, over 40 nuclear power plants in the United States and six other countries, deep-water harbors, and research on structural response to underground nuclear explosions and sonic booms.
In 1949, Dr. Blume helped found the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). He is also a Honorary Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC), EERI, ASCE, American Concrete Institute, and the International Association of Earthquake Engineering. Over 150 paper, articles and books have been published by Dr. Blume, a remarkable number for a person in private practice.
A RETURN TO SCHOOL
"After thirty years as a dropout", Dr. Blume returned to Stanford University in 1964, at the age of 55, to study for his Ph.D. He had decided that he needed to update himself in modern areas such as matrix and computer analysis of structures, statistical methods, stochastic processes, and decision-making in civil engineering. Even though he headed a large and busy consulting firm, he pursued his studies diligently, taking course work for an entire academic year. He began work on his Ph.D. dissertation, "Dynamic Behavior of Multi-Story Buildings with Various Stiffness Characteristics," under the direction of Professor Donovan H. Young. He asked for no special treatment during this time and worked in the same manner as any other student, including all-night hours at the computation center. On January 6, 1967, exactly thirty-four years to the day after receiving the A.B. degree, he was awarded the Ph.D. degree. |
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