9/20/96
CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
STANFORD -- The Civil Engineering Department has received a new endowed fellowship that will support graduate students in its construction engineering and management program who demonstrate an interest in commercial construction.
Stanford's construction engineering program admits about 30 graduate students per year. The new fellowship will provide full support for one student.
The $600,000 endowment comes from Charles Pankow Builders Ltd. of Altadena, Calif. to honor Pankow President Dean E. Stephan for his contributions to the construction industry.
Pankow Builders is a construction contractor that specializes in an approach called "design build." Normally, a large construction project is designed by an architectural firm. Then the project is put out to bid and the contractor that is selected constructs the building. Pankow, by contrast, has integrated the design and construction process.
"Pankow is admired throughout the industry for its track record of innovation. In highly successful projects like the Gateway Center at Union Station in Los Angeles and the Landmark Towers in Waikiki, the company has demonstrated that design-build has some major advantages over the traditional approach," said Clyde "Bob" Tatum, Stanford professor of civil engineering, who teaches construction engineering and management.
Stephan graduated from Stanford in 1961 with a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering, completing a bachelor of arts degree in business administration from Claremont McKenna College in the same year. He joined Pankow Builders in 1972 and worked his way up from chief estimator to president.
In addition to his advocacy of the design-build approach, Stephan's strong technical background has allowed him to serve in positions that commercial contractors seldom assume such as the presidency of the American Concrete Institute and chair of the corporate advisory board of the Civil Engineering Research Foundation.
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