FACULTY PROFILE: DR. MARK MEYERS
As an undergraduate student at UW-Platteville in the December 1979, Mark Meyers published an article in the Geode entitled“ Flood of the Century”, about the devastating flood of the same year in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He could not have known it at the time, but this flood would weave a path through his career, a career which now includes Fellow status in the American Society of Civil Engineers( ASCE).
Dr. Meyers, retiring in January after 17 years of teaching Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW-Platteville, earned his undergraduate degree from UW-Platteville and his master’ s and doctorate degrees from the University of Cincinnati. Throughout his educational career, Meyers’ s focus has been on teaching applications of civil and environmental engineering rather than a deep theoretical approach: his master’ s thesis was a user manual designed to educate civil and environmental engineering students about the hydraulic systems and computer programs used within their profession; his PhD work included developing a series of computer programs for USEPA reviewers that analyzed the geotechnical aspects of embankments used to impound hazardous waste at disposal facilities. He earned his PhD with the goal of teaching at the undergraduate level, specifically at UW-Platteville.
He currently serves on the College of EMS Alumni Board and is very active in ASCE at the Branch and Section level, including coordinating geotechnical engineering speakers for the ASCE Annual Meetings and Spring Technical Conferences. He has written and presented multiple papers at professional conferences, including a paper, " Specifying and Bidding Segmental Faced Concrete MSE Walls on U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District Projects ", co-authored with fellow UW- Platteville alumni Ryan Berg and fellow USACE geotechnical engineer Neil Schwantz, which won the North American Geosynthetic Society Technical Award of Excellence( 1997).
Meyers began his professional career working multiple summers with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation; he also completed two UW-Platteville co-op experiences, working on flood control with the US Army Corps of Engineers in the St. Paul, MN District. The USACE would hire him after grad school as part of a team of civilian employees assigned to a 7-year flood control project in Rochester, MN— beginning in 1988, the $ 200 million project involved lowering the channel bottom and was completed in 1993. Next, Dr. Meyers joined a team focused on flood control in two communities with long histories of annual flooding and challenging geotechnical conditions: Grand Forks / East Grand Forks, ND and Fargo, ND. Minimizing the community impact of these floods called for the development of a new and unique solution: a geotechnical engineering design of flood control levees to prevent the floodwaters from encroaching into the communities, requiring several trips to USACE Headquarters. The Grand Forks project has been successfully completed; the Fargo project is still underway. Of his years spent working to control the devastating impact of floods, Dr. Meyers says that“ One person can’ t do it all …. The large projects are completed by teams, not individuals.” The College of EMS is pleased to congratulate Dr. Meyers on his most recent recognition.