Home

Don White is a Professor at the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.  He has been a member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1997.  Dr. White served on the faculty at the Purdue University School of Civil Engineering from 1987 to 1996.

Dr. White’s research covers a broad area of design and behavior of steel and composite steel-concrete structures as well as computational mechanics and methods of nonlinear analysis, and their applications to design.  Dr. White is a member of the AISC Member Design, and Loads, Analysis and Stability Technical Committees, the AISI Bridge Design Advisory Group; the AISC Specification Committee; and several AASHTO/NSBA Steel Bridge Collaboration Task Groups.  He is past Chair of the SSRC Task Groups 29, Second-Order Inelastic Analysis of Frames, and 4, Structural Members.

During the past 25 years, Dr. White has served as a major contributor to the design and structural analysis sections of the AASHTO LRFD Specifications and the ANSI/AISC Specification for Structural Steel Buildings.  Dr. White received the 2005 Special Achievement Award and the 2009 T.R. Higgins lectureship award from AISC for his research on design criteria for steel and composite steel-concrete members in bridge and building construction.  He received the 2006 Shortridge Hardesty Award from ASCE for his research on advanced frame stability concepts and practical design formulations.  For efforts leading to a comprehensive update to the AASHTO LRFD provisions for steel I- and box-girder bridge design, Dr. White received the 2007 Richard S. Fountain Bridge Task Force Award from AISI and, with M. Grubb and W. Wright, the 2006 Richardson Medal from the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from AISC in 2018.

Dr. White has conducted research on a wide range of topics related to stability design and engineering of steel building and bridge structures. This includes work on construction simulation of curved and skewed steel bridges, investigation of the behavior of thin-web girders, and stability of components and structural systems during construction and in their final constructed condition. He was one of several researchers privileged to be involved closely with curved steel bridge experimental testing at the FHWA Turner Fairbank Highway Research Center and other laboratories from 1997 through 2005. Dr. White served as Principal Investigator (PI) on NCHRP 12-79 – Guidelines for Analytical Methods and Construction Engineering of Curved and Skewed Steel Girder Bridges, and 20-07/355 – Guidelines for Reliable Fit-Up of Steel I-Girder Bridges, which have resulted in numerous improvements to AASHTO Specifications and Guidelines documents. He was the PI on a 2014-2019 FHWA-funded research effort to modernize the AASHTO LRFD provisions pertaining to all types of non-composite box section members and systems.

Beyond his direct contributions to the development of the AASHTO and AISC Specifications, Dr. White has actively introduced the results of his research to practice. He is a co-author of the AISC (2013) Design Guide 28, Stability Design of Steel Buildings, as well as the AISC (2011 & 2021) Design Guide 25, Frame Design Using Nonprismatic Members. These documents provide extensive practical guidelines on the engineering of steel building structural systems. In addition, he is author of Volume 4 of the FHWA (2012) and AISC/NSBA (2021) Steel Bridge Design Handbook: Strength Behavior and Design of Steel Systems and Members, which provides an extensive overview of the background to the AASHTO LRFD provisions for steel design.