John Abel papers

John Abel earned his B.C.E. from Cornell University in 1963, an M.S. from Stanford University in 1964, and his Ph.D in Structural Engineering and Structural Mechanics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. He joined the Cornell University faculty in 1974, after four years of teaching civil engineering and architecture at Princeton University. He retired from the faculty in 2004. During his research career, he has worked on such topics as concrete shells (especially cooling towers), membrane roofs, domes, steel framed structures, earthquake engineering, computer-aided design, computational mechanics, and interactive computer graphics for engineering applications and education.

He is the author or co-author of over 200 papers and reports, dealing mainly with computer-related topics in structural engineering.

Abel was President of the International Association of Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), a worldwide organization of about 900 engineers, architects, academics and builders with an interest in long-span and light-weight structures. He was President of this Association for two 3-year terms, 2006-2012. He had previously served as a vice-president of IASS since 1992 and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the IASS from 1995-2007. He is a registered professional engineer, a Fellow of ASCE, and a member of several technical committees, journal editorial boards, and technical societies (including ASCE, ACI, and IABSE).