Individual Memberships

Student Member ($20)

Full-time graduate students who have expressed interest in the work of the Council.

Member-at-Large ($70-$119)

Individuals who have expressed interest in the work of the Council, and who have done or are doing work germane to its interest, may be appointed as Members-at-Large by the Executive Committee.

Member at large is the SSRC standard membership level. The minimum fee is $70; however, members are encouraged to donate above and beyond this minimum fee to support the mission of SSRC.

Winter Society ($120-$299)

Winter Society membership allows members to contribute above the standard member-at-large level. 

The Winter Society is named for George Winter to whom we are indebted for the Council’s change from CRC to SSRC. It was during his tour as Chair of the Council when it was clear that its mission was to be a forum for more than just columns. In unanimity of agreement, Structural Stability Research Council was thus born.

George Winter’s earliest contribution to CRC was in connection with one of its very first “committees” — treating thin-walled cold-formed members. He was the world authority in the field and his leadership benefited the Council greatly in those early years. He was a unique person. His grasp of the fundamentals of structural behavior was so complete that he always seemed to be the first one to come to the technical essence of a problem. Beyond that, his leadership in the “administrative” affairs of SSRC was notable.

He was the only person to serve on both the AISC and ACI code committees. Vienna born, Winter was affiliated with Cornell University for practically his entire life, his research lending it a prestige not duplicated in many other institutions. He was one of the great engineering teachers of our time. He was identified in 1999 by ENR as one of the 125 “Top People” in the construction industry.

Distinguished Members (Voluntary Donation)

Distinguished members are appointed by the SSRC Executive Committee in accordance with the SSRC Bylaws. Distinguished members have no obligation to pay dues but are encouraged to donate as they can.

Donor Societies

Donor societies allow individuals to contribute above the Winter Society and allow organizations to partner in supporting the SSRC mission. Donor Society Members will be presented with a certificate signed by the SSRC Executive Committee Chair for the society to which they are appointed by the SSRC Executive Committee (see below) at the next annual business meeting after appointment by the SSRC Executive Committee. Organization members will be allowed two representatives with full membership privileges. Donor Societies, with their permission, will be listed on the SSRC Website.

Beedle Society ($300-$599)

The Beedle Society is named after Lynn Beedle. After graduation from the University of California at Berkeley, and a career in the US Navy during the Second World War, Lynn Beedle spent his entire professional life at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. For many years he was director of the Fritz Engineering Laboratory which became world-famous during his tenure. For many of us the name Lehigh and Beedle are synonymous. Many of the experiments and theories of the strength and stability of steel structures that served as the basis for all modern steel design specifications in the world were performed and developed there under his leadership. His name is associated as a leader of three intellectual activities that dominated the structural steel engineering profession in the second half of the Twentieth Century: 1) plastic analysis and design; 2) the ultimate strength of axially loaded columns; and 3) tall building planning and design. Lynn Beedle joined the SSRC soon after its founding and he was one of the members who formulated the questions and provided the answers to the pressing stability concerns of the 1950’s and 1960’s. He served as technical secretary in the early years, he was chairman of the Council, and for many years he was its Director. He spent more than half his life nurturing and guiding the Council, acting as its spokesman here and abroad. Through his vision the SSRC is one of the most esteemed American structural engineering organizations in the world today.

Shanley Society ($600-$899)

The Shanley Society is named after F.R. Shanley. It is difficult to establish much of the life history of Shanley from the data available in the technical literature. He was professor of Engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, and he was associated with the Rand Corporation and with at least one of the West Coast airplane companies during WWII. The writer met him shortly before his death and was very impressed by his modesty and friendliness. Among his works is a very fine text on the Weight-Strength Analysis of Aircraft Structures (1952 and 1960). He did considerable work also on the creep buckling of columns and on plate girders with corrugated webs.

Shanley will be most remembered by his brilliant work on the strength of inelastic columns. Engesser and Considere had developed the tangent modulus and the reduced modulus theory of inelastic column buckling around the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century. Both of these theories were based on the assumption that at buckling there exists an adjacent buckled configuration that has the same load as the unbuckled configuration. Both of these theories had serious internal contradictions but it took about fifty years before Shanley showed that buckling indeed starts at the Tangent Modulus load, and that further deformation can occur only with an increase of load. He showed this on hand of a very careful experiment, and then he developed a simple but ingenious model to mathematically trace the load-deflection path. Shanley broke the intellectual logjam that hampered the understanding of column behavior.

Johnston Society ($900-$2399)

The Johnston Society is named after Bruce Johnston. He was one of the original members of the Structural Stability Research Council, then named Column Research Council, and from its founding in 1944 to his death, Bruce contributed mightily and continuously to all aspects of it. He was part of the group that formulated the important questions to be researched by the Council in the 1940’s and 1950’s. He made many important theoretical and experimental additions to the science and art of structural design against instability. The CRC Column equation, the CRC Interaction Equation, the ultimate strength theory of non-linear imperfect aluminum columns and many other innovations are attributable to him. He and his students performed many of the basic experiments on residual stresses, column and beam-column strengths and torsion strengths. Johnston’s greatest gifts to our profession were the first three editions of the CRC/SSRC Guide to Stability Design Criteria for Metal Structures (1960, 1966 and 1976). As editor of these volumes, he assembled the most comprehensive up-to-date knowledge on all aspects of structural stability of metal structures. These volumes served as beacons for specification writing bodies and for structural engineers searching for answers to difficult design problems. During his careers at Lehigh University, University of Michigan and University of Arizona he guided the development of many of today’s leaders in structural engineering.

Euler Society ($2400 and above)

The Euler Society is named after Leonard Euler who was born in Basel, Switzerland, and lived from 1707 to 1783. He studied mathematics with Jean Bernoulli and was a good friend of the brothers Daniel and Nicholas Bernoulli. He also studied theology, oriental languages and medicine. At age 20 he went to the court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, where he became a professor of Physics in 1730 and then of Mathematics in 1733. From 1741 to 1766 he was at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin. From there he returned to Russia. He contributed many memoirs to the Russian and Prussian academies of science.

Euler’s greatest work was done in pure Mathematics and he is one of the founders of modern science. He made significant contributions to differential and integral calculus, and he is considered the father of the calculus of variations. As part of this work he studied the buckling of columns, and gave us the famous elastic buckling formula that is the basis of the design of columns in his paper “De Curvis Elasticis”. He also studied lunar motions and Optics and contributed many original papers on these subjects.

(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica)