ELLIS

Clyde E. “Sonny” Ellis is named general counsel, senior vice president and secretary of Parsons Corp., the Pasadena, Calif., contractor. He will replace Gary L. Stone, who retires from the role June 30 but remains in the firm as counsel and advisor to CEO Charles L. Harrington. Ellis had been vice president and associate general counsel and previously served as counsel to General Electric Co.’s transportation division. Named executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer is George L. Ball. He succeeds newly named CEO Harrington in that position and is formerly senior vice president for financial systems and control. John C. L. Guyer has joined the firm as vice president and associate general counsel for its transportation group unit. He had been senior counsel with Alcoa Inc. and assistant general counsel of Reynolds International Inc., a unit of Reynolds Metals Co. Angelle M. Roussel is named vice president and assistant treasurer. She succeeds Ian R. Thomsen, who is retiring from the role but remains as special assistant to Ball. Roussel had been assistant to Thomsen.

EVANS

Allied North America, the Jericho, N.Y., construction insurance and surety brokerage firm, has appointed Alejandra Evans executive vice president of business development. Now based in Washington, D.C., she had been senior vice president at Wachovia Corp.

Steven Bernstein has joined Stantec Inc., Edmonton, Alberta, as a principal and head of the civil engineering team in the design firm’s New England planning and landscape architecture practice. Now based in Wellesley, Mass., he had been president and chief operating officer of Daylor Consulting Group, Braintree, Mass.

Obituaries

ABDEL-GHAFFAR

Ahmed Abdel-Ghaffar, an internationally known civil engineering professor at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and an expert in analysis and monitoring of long-span flexible bridges, died April 1, after a long illness. He was 61.

Abdel-Ghaffar’s probe of the city’s Vincent Thomas Bridge, done in graduate school in 1974, helped set new standards for collecting, analyzing and interpreting structural dynamic measurements from complex 3-D extended structures. His work led to development of high-fidelity computational tools that could be used reliably to design such structures to resist earthquake ground motion. Abdel-Ghaffar was a consultant to the California Dept. of Transportation for the Vincent Thomas bridge’s retrofit, determining the structure’s damping characteristics. He was also among experts who pioneered forced-vibration experiments on the Santa Felicia earth dam and interpreted its recorded seismic and dynamic response.

A native of Egypt, he had been on the USC engineering faculty since 1987, after previously teaching at Cairo University, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois-Chicago. The researcher’s pioneering work as a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology brought him acclaim in the then-emerging field of sensor-based monitoring of long-span flexible bridges. “Professor Abdel-Ghaffar’s excellence and innovation in the area of long-span bridges was known internationally and he was much beloved by his students,” says Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. “He will be greatly missed by all of his colleagues.”

BINGER

Wilson V. Binger, former partner and chairman of engineering firm Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, who oversaw its work on large global dams, died April 21 in Chappaqua, N.Y., at age 91. Binger was TAMS chairman from 1975 to 1984, during which the firm designed and provided construction management for Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam, one of the world’s largest water resources projects that set some still-unsurpassed engineering and construction records. TAMS was acquired by Earth Tech in 2002, and is now part of AECOM. Binger was vice president of the International Committee on Large Dams from 1978 to 1981 and only the second American president of the Federation Internationale des Ingenieurs Conseils (FIDIC).