The Cullen College of Engineering extends its condolences to the family of Kaspar Willam, Emeritus Professor of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.
Willam passed away in January in his birthplace, Bezau, Austria. While at the University of Houston, Willam served as Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor. He was a pioneer and leading expert on computational modeling of concrete materials and structures, bringing to the field innovative ideas and modeling approaches.
Among many honors, he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2004, “for contributions to constitutive modeling and computational failure analysis of concrete and quasi-brittle materials and structures.”
Willam joined the Cullen College of Engineering in 2010. Previous to UH, he was a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for 29 years.
In addition to being an NAE member, he was also a Nathan M. Newmark Medal Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. From 1969 to 2019, he received an author credit on more than 300 papers.
He is remembered as an inspirational mentor by generations of younger colleagues, who saw him as an exemplary role model and a gentleman through and through.
Kaspar enjoyed sharing with his friends and colleagues his love of opera, skiing and the finer things in life. With his passing our community has lost a great engineer, a source of inspiration and a loyal friend.
A memorial service was held in Austria. A German-language memory site is available here.