AAWE President, Prof. Sarkar, shared the sad news that our colleague, long-time friend, and one of the pioneers of wind engineering, Dr. Jack E. Cermak, passed away on August 21, 2012 at Fort Collins, Colorado. He would have been 90 in a couple of weeks. Many of you who interacted with him professionally or personally know that he was an educator (Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University or CSU), engineer, visionary, mentor and a friend. He was fondly known as the father of wind engineering because of his early contributions to the academic field that later emerged as wind engineering.
He had a very distinguished career at CSU where he was named the University Distinguished Professor in 1986. He was the President Emeritus of Cermak, Peterka, Petersen or CPP, Inc., a wind engineering consulting company that he co-founded in 1984. Prof. Cermak served as the first president of the Wind Engineering Research Council (WERC) for 10 years (1976-1985) before it was renamed as AAWE. ASCE has established the Jack Cermak Medal to be awarded annually for outstanding contributions in wind engineering. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1973. Jack will be remembered for his pioneering work in fluid mechanics and wind engineering over his long illustrious career of more than 50 years.
I have known Jack Cermak for many years and interacted with him quite a few times during my several visits to Fort Collins, the last one being in Summer 2008 on my way to attend the first AAWE Workshop. He was a true gentleman on top of being an outstanding scholar. Jack will be missed by all of us. A link to the New York Times obituary for Prof. Cermak is provided here.