A LEADER COMES HOME
Alum Takes Helm at School of Civil & Construction Engineering

As the newly-recruited director of OSU’s School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Scott Ashford brings to Oregon State more than a decade of leadership experience at one of the nation’s top engineering programs.

He also brings years of industry experience at firms like CH2M HILL, research grants totaling close to $1 million, an innovative and mobile Structures Testing Lab, and big plans to build a Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction lab on campus where the relationship between buildings, foundations, and soils can be studied.

New leadership. New research. New ideas. But OSU is not new to Ashford.

A 1983 OSU civil engineering grad, Ashford earned master’s and doctoral degrees in geotechnical engineering from UC Berkeley before becoming a professor at UC San Diego, where he helped the Jacobs School of Engineering climb the national rankings from No. 43 to No. 11.

“During that process, I learned a lot, and I plan to take that knowledge and apply it here at Oregon State,” says Ashford, who has taught and conducted research around the world – from design work on California highways to seismic hazards in Thailand and landslide mitigation in Sri Lanka.

One of Ashford’s main goals at OSU is growing the graduate programs in civil engineering and construction engineering management.

“Students today need to know that a master’s degree helps lead to a successful career,” he says. “I believe every single one of our students should consider staying on to get a master’s degree before entering the job market. We have an outstanding undergraduate program, so my focus is growing our graduate program while maintaining the high quality of our undergraduate program.”

Tapping his industry experience, Ashford also plans to grow research funding and develop new engineers who are work-ready at graduation.

“I have a good sense of what industry wants in terms of research and graduates because I’ve been there,” he says. “If you look around at the multidisciplinary research underway here at Oregon State, we have an outstanding group of faculty, not just in this School, but throughout the College and across campus. We’re a real asset to industry.”

Ashford, who joins a strong leadership team that is guiding the College through an unprecedentedtransformation, also plans to expand the new Master’s of Engineering (MEng) degree.

“I want our students as well as working engineers in the field to know they can come to OSU for one year and get a master’s degree.”

Ashford will serve as director of the Kiewit Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Research Cluster. Both Ashford and his wife, Meleah, a water resources engineer and an OSU engineering alumna, are pleased to be back in Oregon.

“We both feel we had an outstanding education at Oregon State,” Ashford says. “The education we received here really set us up for success. Now I have the opportunity to give back, to raise the prominence of the school.”