Burns & McDonnell Co-Founder Robert McDonnell Named Historic Engineer

Date Posted: November 27, 2019

Posted In: Organizations, People,

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has named Robert E. McDonnell, one of the co-founders of Burns & McDonnell, a Historic Civil Engineer. McDonnell is one of only 45 engineers who have been selected for this recognition since the ASCE’s founding in 1852. Representing more than 150,000 members in more than 177 countries, ASCE bestows the designation upon engineers who “led the way in innovative civil engineering design, serving as an inspiration for today’s practitioners.”

“We are thrilled Mr. McDonnell is being honored as one of the Historic Civil Engineers,” says Ray Kowalik, CEO and chairman of Burns & McDonnell. “The values he instilled in our firm when it was founded are still the values we stand by today. Mr. McDonnell was a strong believer that engineering helped improve the quality of people’s lives and he wrote hundreds of articles and spoke to many audiences throughout his life about this topic. That is why our core mission today remains to ‘improve the quality of life,’ through all the different types of projects we perform.”

Robert E. McDonnell led the firm he founded with longtime business partner and Stanford University classmate, Clinton S. Burns, for 53 years, from 1898 to 1951.