Engineering Memory of the Month

The 30-year “drop out”

How becoming the acknowledged “father” of his field. That’s exactly what happened with John A. Blume, widely revered as the “father of earthquake engineering.” He earned his PhD in civil engineering from Stanford on Jan. 6, 1967, 33 years to the day after earning his BS here.

Born the son of a builder in 1909, Blume was inspired to study the response of structures to ground movement after he witnessed the horrible destruction in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1925. After graduating from Stanford (the first time) he worked for several companies before starting his own in 1945. His firm worked on projects as high-stakes as the restoration fo the California State Capitol and the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and 70 other plants around the world. In the meantime, he helped found the Earthquake Engineers Assocation of America and earned several awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Although a widely acknowledged expert, Blume returned to Stanford in 1964 at the age of 55 to earn his PhD. He was looking to study modern techniques such as matrix and computer analysis of structures, statistical methods, stochastic processes, and decision-making in civil engineering. Not long after he finished his degree, he endowed a graduate fellowship at Stanford and then helped establish the earthquake engineering research center that today bears his name. Blume died in 2002. The photo above is courtesy of his wife, Jene Blume, who retains a strong connection to the center.can anyone who takes 33 years to get his PhD be considered a star student? How about when that person spends three decades between undergraduate and graduate study