Six Honored as UA Distinguished Engineering Fellows

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama College of Engineering recently honored six people by inducting them into its class of 2001 Distinguished Engineering Fellows.

Brian Douglas Barr, Vincent P. Caruso, James M. Kelly, Hua-An Liu, Sammy J. Seals and Herbert Kenneth White were selected for the top honor the College awards its alumni.

Barr is vice president for Brasfield & Gorrie in Birmingham, where he manages the Industrial Division and specializes in construction of industrial manufacturing plant facilities and heavy civil construction. He graduated from the University in 1981 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Brasfield & Gorrie is among the top 50 contractors in the United States and is projected to do more than $1 billion in new construction in 2001. A native of Florence, Barr lives in Birmingham.

Caruso, who has served in several positions with NASA and the Boeing Company, specialized in space vehicle manufacturing assembly and test and launch operations associated with the Redstone, Saturn Apollo, Sky Lab and Space Shuttle programs. He retired from NASA in 1987 and retired from Boeing in 1998, as project manager, Shuttle Main Engine Test and Project Operations. His efforts contributed to the success of the manned space shuttle, and he has won NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal and the Astronaut Silver Snoopy Award. He also holds a patent for Rod Peening – Process and Tool Improvement. Caruso was named a Distinguished Fellow of the UA Department of Industrial Engineering in 2000. A New Orleans, La., native and Huntsville resident, Caruso graduated from UA in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering.

Serving as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Kelly is the first UA graduate to be selected as an astronaut. In March 2001, he piloted the Space Shuttle Discovery on a mission to the International Space Station. More than 2,400 people applied for NASA’s 1996 astronaut class, and Kelly was one of only 35 members and only 10 pilots selected. Kelly earned his UA master’s degree in aerospace engineering in 1996 through the QUEST, or Quality University Extended Site Telecourses, program. In QUEST, classes at the University are videotaped, and those tapes are then forwarded to students. Originally from Burlington, Iowa, Kelly now lives in Houston, Texas.

For more than two decades, Liu has been a successful chemical engineer, serving with Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton Company, for the past 21 years. He handles marketing for KBR as well, focusing on promoting petrochemical engineering and technologies in the Asia Pacific region, particularly China. Liu received his master’s degree in chemical engineering from UA in 1975. The native of Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China, now resides in Sugar Land, Texas.

Seals was the recipient of the George C. K. Johnson Scholarship at UA, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 1968. For the past 27 years he has been with the United States Postal Service where he currently serves as manager, Test and Evaluation, at the USPS Headquarters Engineering Research and Development Facility in Merrifield, Va. Seals was named a Distinguished Fellow of the UA Department of Industrial Engineering in 1999, and in April 2001 he began serving a two-year term with the University National Alumni Association Office, as its regional vice president for the northeast United States. Seals is a native of Amory, Miss., and resides in Centreville, Va.

In 1986, White formed Pilgreen and White, a company that specialized in general civil engineering projects, primarily in the land development industry. Then in 1998, he created H. Kenneth White & Associates, offering a full complement of civil engineers and land surveyors. He serves as the national vice president of the American Consulting Engineers Council and has been a board member of the Capstone Engineering Society for a decade. He will begin serving as the CES national chairman in the fall of 2001. Named as a Fellow of the College of Engineering’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1998, White has taught land surveying at Auburn University, and seminars for attorneys and paralegal groups on surveying and state law concerning land surveying. The Cullman native now resides in Pike Road. He graduated from the University in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.

In 1837, The University of Alabama became the first university in the state to offer engineering classes and was one of the first five in the nation to do so. Today, the College of Engineering has about 1,900 students and more than 90 faculty. It has been fully accredited since accreditation standards were implemented in the 1930s.