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C. Allin Cornell (1938–2007)

C. Allin Cornell passed away on 14 December 2007 after a two-year battle with cancer. His many contributions in earthquake engineering and the earth sciences have had an enormous impact on current thinking in both fields.

C. Allin Cornell, 1938–2007

Allin received an A.B. degree from Stanford University in architecture and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford in civil engineering. His 1964 Ph.D. dissertation, "Stochastic Process Models in Structural Engineering," and his 1971 book, Probability, Statistics, and Decision for Civil Engineers (co-authored with Jack Benjamin), laid the foundation for a lifelong interest in stochastic models that represent environmental loads on structures and that determine structural response to those loads. His book remains a standard reference for students and researchers to this day.

He held a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1964 to 1983 and in 1983 moved back to Stanford to take a position of research professor, a half-time commitment that allowed him to pursue consulting on a half-time basis. This arrangement meant that his consulting advice benefited from his research results, but also that his research directions and interests were guided by relevant problems faced by practicing engineers and earth scientists.

Allin most enjoyed pursuing solutions to problems at the interface between engineers and earth scientists, and his numerous professional contributions and awards for his research reflect these efforts. On the earth science side he served as President of the Seismological Society of America (1986–1987) and was awarded the Harry Fielding Reid Medal of the SSA (its highest honor) in 2001. Additionally, he was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2002, an honor accorded to only a handful of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Robin K. McGuire, Thomas C. Hanks, and Jack W. Baker