Donald W. White, Ph.D., F.ASCE, who has served for 37 years as an educator at Purdue University and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
White has made numerous contributions to the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) specifications and guidelines, and to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) structural design standards and design guidelines, during his tenure at Purdue and at Georgia Tech.
His research covers a broad area of design and behavior of steel and composite steel-concrete structures, as well as computational mechanics, methods of nonlinear analysis, and applications to design. White is a member of the AISC Technical Committees 4, Member Design, and 3, Loads, Analysis and Stability; the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) Bridge Design Advisory Group; the AISC Specification Committee; the National Steel Bridge Alliance (NSBA) Technical Committee, and several AASHTO/NSBA Steel Bridge Collaboration Task Groups. He is the past chair of the Structural Stability Research Council (SSRC) Task Group 29, Second-Order Inelastic Analysis of Frames, and 4, Structural Members.
White has served as a major contributor to the design and structural analysis sections of the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design and the ANSI-AISC Structural Steel Building design specifications during the past 25 years.
His research and technical committee activities were instrumental in the development and adoption of the direct analysis method of design, which is the primary method of overall structural system design provided in Chapter C and Appendix 1 of the AISC 360 Specification.
White was one of several researchers privileged to be involved closely with curved steel bridge experimental testing at the FHWA Turner Fairbank Highway Research Center and other laboratories from 1997 through 2005. This research led to a complete rewrite of the AASHTO LRFD Section 6 provisions for steel bridge design, implementing a unified approach to straight and curved I-girder bridge design.
White served as PI on NCHRP 12-79 Guidelines for Analytical Methods and Construction Engineering of Curved and Skewed Steel Girder Bridges and 20-07/355 Guidelines for Reliable Fit-Up of Steel I-Girder Bridges, which resulted in numerous improvements to AASHTO Specifications and NSBA Guidelines directly related to the research.
During 2014-19, he was the PI on a significant FHWA-funded research effort leading to the modernization of various AASHTO LRFD box-section member and arch structural design provisions.
White co-authored the AISC (2013) Design Guide 28, Stability Design of Steel Buildings, and the AISC (2011 & 2021) Design Guide 25, Frame Design Using Nonprismatic Members. These documents provide extensive practical guidelines on the engineering of steel building structural systems. In addition, he is the author of Volume 4 of the FHWA (2012) and AISC/NSBA (2021) Steel Bridge Design Handbook, Strength Behavior of Steel, which provides an extensive overview of the background to the AASHTO LRFD provisions for steel design.
