Academy of Distinguished Alumni

  • Alumni Image #1:
  • Image Caption Title #1: KTX High Speed Rail - Seoul, Republic of Korea
  • Image Caption #1: Meinheit was part of a quality audit of all transportation facilities for the high-speed rail system, Korea Train eXpress (KTX), which is South Korea's high-speed rail system. The South Korean government, in an effort to build a superior rail system, retained Meinheit’s firm, WJE, to perform a quality audit of its structures. WJE inspected a variety of civil structures, including bridge foundations, bridge piers and spans, tunnels, and earthwork structures.
  • Alumni Image #2:
  • Image Caption Title #2: Wiss, Janney and Elstner (WJE) Associates Research
  • Image Caption #2: Meinheit has been a major contributor to WJE’s research and product evaluation services. As a result of result on-site investigations and research testing, he has published articles on fatigue of steel connections, bearing walls, box girder bridge behavior, parking structure repair, expansion anchor behavior, head-stud anchor behavior, and manufactured housing foundations under both static and simulated seismic conditions.

Texas CAEE alumnus Donald Meinheit

Donald F. Meinheit

Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 1977
M.S., University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, 1968
B.S., Purdue University, 1966

Inducted, 2011

Donald Meinheit is a principal at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associations, Inc. (WJE), where he has served as project engineer/manager on numerous collapse and failure investigations, laboratory test programs, and a variety of high-profile structural and material and evaluation projects. He is a highly-respected technical advisor and mentor in the areas of concrete properties, design and behavior of precast/prestressed concrete and anchorage to concrete. 

Meinhet has worked for the Portland Cement Association—Research and Development Laboratories, the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and the consulting firm of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. (WJE).

Meinheit worked for WJE for 27 years before retiring full-time in 2006. At the firm, he was responsible for laboratory investigations of expansion anchors, a prestressed concrete transit ties quality assurance program, failure and collapse investigations, structural condition evaluation and load ratings, repair of deteriorated structures, and nondestructive testing.

He currently is an Affiliated Consultant with the firm, where he continues to consult on a wide variety of projects, mostly in the areas of concrete properties, design, behavior, precast/prestressed concrete, and anchorage to concrete. He continues to mentor young staff at WJE on concrete-related problems and has also taught at Purdue University on a part-time basis.

His activities in professional organizations of the American Concrete Institute (ACI), Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI), and the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (CRSI) are extensive. He has chaired technical committees within each of these organizations. As the co-author of the PCI Design Handbook procedures for the design of headed stud anchors and the chair of the ACI committee advancing the design of post-installed mechanical and adhesive anchors, he has been associated with significant code design-related work on concrete anchors.

In his retirement, he accepted the responsibility of leading an ACI committee to create a certification program for adhesive anchor installers.

Meinheit’s wife, Marian, and their two daughters, Janet and Lara, contribute to his professional career's success. Although their children were in kindergarten and second grade when the family moved to Austin in 1972, they still recall major events during their time here.