Donald R. Sherman, a former professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a leading expert on hollow structural steel (HSS) connections, died March 26 at age 89.
Born in Cleveland, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) and then obtained his PhD in structural engineering from the University of Illinois. He worked for ESSO Research before joining the faculty at UWM, where he retired as a professor emeritus in 1997.
Sherman was a long-time member of the AISC Committee on Specifications and the Structural Stability Research Council. He was widely regarded as an expert on the design and behavior of HSS, for which he was honored in 2002 with an AISC lifetime achievement award.
“I met Don and his wife Joyce in 1964 when I went to the University of Illinois, and we’ve been close friends ever since,” recalled James M. Fisher, PE, PhD, former chair of the AISC Committee on Specifications. “Don had a great dry sense of humor. Two items he instructed me about were that when doing experimental research, ‘you should only perform two tests, so that you can draw a straight line between the data points–a third test may mess that up!’ He also told me that while working as ESSO he wrote his first computer program and it still works to this day. ‘You feed the results of your hand calculations into a computer program and then print the answers out so that they’re believable!”
Sherman was the author of hundreds of papers and publications, notably the first edition of AISC Design Guide 24: Hollow Structural Section Connections, AISC's 2002 report on the Design of Extended Shear Tabs, and the 1996 Engineering Journal paper "Designing with Structural Tubing." You can also find some of his lectures in AISC’s education portal at learning.aisc.org.
"Don was such an unassuming person," said AISC President Charles J. Carter, SE, PE, PhD. "He listened more than he spoke, but when he did what he said always helped the group he was working with get closer to the solution."