The Frank and Frances De Pietro Fellowship Program in Civil Engineering

The De Pietro fellowship program was created in 1998 by brothers Robert ’69 and Dennis De Pietro in honor of their parents, Frank and Frances. The purpose of the fellowship is to support undergraduate research in the field of civil engineering. The fellowship has been supported with additional funding from NIST, DARPA, Army Corps of Engineers, ATF, DOC, Caltech, Southern California Edison, BioSTAR and FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission).

Zee Durón ’81 has been a professor at Harvey Mudd College since 1987, is currently the Jude and Eileen Laspa Professor of Engineering, director of the De Pietro Fellowship Program in Civil Engineering and serves as chair, department of Engineering. Since receiving his PhD in civil engineering from Caltech, professor Durón was selected by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the nation’s brightest young engineers in 2004, and is considered to be a leading developer of field-test procedures aimed at identifying response characteristics from low-level vibrations that occur naturally in structures. His procedures have been applied to field studies of dams, buildings, bridges, tunnels, rockets and to stability monitoring of burning buildings.