EWRI LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Established in 2001, the Environmental & Water Resources Institute Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to members who are judged to have advanced the profession, exhibited technical competence, and significantly contributed to public service, research, or practice in the environmental and water resources profession. The 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to Dr. John J. Cassidy, Dr. Robert M. Clark, and Dr. Kenneth G. Renard in recognition of their lifelong and eminent contribution to the environmental and water resources engineering disciplines through practice, research, and public service.
Dr. John J. Cassidy has served in the arena of water resources engineering for more than 50 years. After serving in the U.S. Army for two years, he started his professional career as a Design Engineer for the Montana State Water Conservation Board in Helena, MT, helping to develop designs and construction documents for dams, canals, pumping stations, and irrigation projects. Following completion of his Ph.D., Cassidy joined the faculty of the University of Missouri at Columbia where he taught fluid mechanics, hydrology, and water resources engineering, and performed research in Hydraulic Engineering and served as Chairman of Civil Engineering between 1971 and 1974. Dr. Cassidy joined the Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco as Assistant Chief Hydraulic Engineer in 1974, and continued with Bechtel until retirement in 1995, having attained the position of Manager of Geotechnical and Hydraulic Engineering Services. Throughout his career with Bechtel, he was involved in the hydraulic design of dams, spillways, canals, hydroelectric plants, flood-control facilities, and cooling-water systems for large industrial projects. Since retiring from Bechtel, Dr. Cassidy has been a private consultant, providing services for projects in Colombia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Australia as well as here in the United States. Dr. Cassidy was named a Bechtel Fellow in 1985, and awarded ASCE's Hydraulic Structures Medal in 1996 and the American Institute of Hydrology's Ray K. Linsley Award in 2001.
Dr. Robert M. Clark has spent three quarters of his 43-year career as an expert on drinking water. He joined the US Public Health Service (US PHS) Commissioned Corps in 1961 and was transferred to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at its creation in 1971. In 1992, Dr. Clark retired from the US PHS Commissioned Corps and was reappointed into Civil Service. He served as Director of EPA's Water Supply and Water Resources Division from 1985 to 1999 (both as a Commissioned Officer and in Civil Service). In 1999, he was appointed to one of EPA's Senior Expert Positions where he served until his retirement from EPA in July 2002.Dr. Clark is currently an independent consultant, working primarily on projects relating to homeland security. For these projects, he is responsible for developing methodology for calibrating water quality models in drinking water distribution systems as well as developing a pilot scale network for conducting research on the fundamental hydrodynamics of water movement in networks. He is also a consultant to the University of Cincinnati on a contract with Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). He has worked with Rutgers University's Center for Information Management, Integration, and Connectivity (CIMIC) to assist in development of an early warning system (EWS) for drinking water utilities. He recently completed a project with the US State Department to develop criteria for drinking water treatment in US Embassies.
Dr. Kenneth G. Renard is a retired Hydraulic Engineer who spent over 40 years with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Tucson, AZ. He is also an adjunct professor in the Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department at the University of Arizona. Dr. Renard has earned both a national and international reputation for being an expert in erosion, sediment transport, and deposition processes. During his research assignment with ARS in Wisconsin and Arizona, he pioneered in watershed engineering research in arid and semiarid areas where stream processes dominate the hydrologic cycle. The time that Dr. Renard dedicated to this task led to development of instrumentation for measuring runoff in sediment-laden ephemeral streams and his designs are utilized by trained technicians who now carry on the work he began.Dr. Renard has been active in ASCE at local, state, and national levels throughout his career. On the international front, Dr. Renard has also contributed to conferences, projects, and symposia in Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, and Japan. He was a consultant to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Association on a project in Morocco in 1989-90 whose objective was to reduce erosion and aid in flood control. During visits to the country, he implemented field programs to parameterize US computer simulation models for Moroccan conditions so that US technology could be used locally. He continues to serve as Fellowship Contact to Moroccan citizens on extended training assignments in the United States.