John Aidoo has been selected the Roland E. Hutchins Endowed Faculty Chair in Civil Engineering in recognition of his achievements as an award-winning teacher and academic scholar who is committed toward providing students with valuable international and industrial design experiences.

Endowed faculty chairs support Rose-Hulman’s best and brightest professors who demonstrate professional activity in both national and international circles of scholarship. They receive annual stipends to continue to excel in their specialized areas, lead conversations with other educators in their fields and support research opportunities with undergraduate students, according to Anne Houtman, provost and vice president for academic affairs.

The Roland E. Hutchins Endowed Chair supports civil engineering faculty professional development activities. It honors the legacy of Hutchins, an esteemed educator who served for 32 years in Rose-Hulman’s Department of Civil Engineering.

In his three-year term as a faculty endowed chair, Aidoo will work to extend international design experiences for civil engineering students. His will include collaborations in Dominican Republic and his native country of Ghana, where he formerly worked as a structural engineer. He also intends to establish relationships with industrial partners to increase design engineering opportunities for students.

Aidoo is co-adviser for the Rose-Hulman student chapter of Engineers Without Borders, assistant director of the Operation Catapult program and a faculty mentor for the American Society of Civil Engineering’s Excellence in Civil Engineering program. He also has worked with elementary and middle school teachers to implement STEM-related projects into their classrooms.

Aidoo’s passion for teaching earned him the Dean’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 2015.

Emeriti professor and former department chair Jim McKinney was the inaugural Hutchins Chair. He was inducted into the Asphalt Pavement Association of Indiana Hall of Fame as a hallmark contributor to Indiana’s transportation industry after coordinating the Hot Mix Asphalt Quality Assurance Certification Program for several years in conjunction with APAI and the Indiana Department of Transportation. The second Hutchins Chair was James Hanson, who spent time interviewing leading structural engineers across the country to find common traits leading to success. His work will soon appear in the textbook, “Structural Analysis: Skills for Practice.”