ROY E. OLSON (1931-2024)

BY DAVID E. DANIEL AND ROBERT B. GILBERT

ROY EDWIN OLSON, a world-renowned geotechnical engineer, died peacefully at home near San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 29, 2024, at the age of 92. Roy was an inspiring educator, an accomplished and award-winning researcher, and a highly sought-after consultant.

He was born Sept. 13, 1931, in Richmond, Indiana. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1933 when his father, a jack-of-all-trades, began selling construction equipment for Minneapolis Equipment Company. In 1945, his father formed Olson Equipment Company. As a teenager, Roy learned valuable construction skills while helping his father.

One of Roy’s great passions, boxing, developed accidentally at a summer camp during high school. In a moment of confrontation, he leveled another boy with a punch. Shortly afterward, he bought a pair of boxing gloves and studied boxing technique, despite being one of the smallest boys his age. During his first boxing match, Roy dislocated his left shoulder. He would box again and again — and dislocate his shoulder again and again. His determination was cemented early in life.

After graduating from high school, Roy enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study civil engineering. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953, then accepted a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree there, graduating in 1955.

Roy’s career was shaped significantly by summer jobs during his studies. In 1953, he worked for Twin City Testing and Engineering Company, performing tests on steel, concrete, welds, and other materials. In 1954, he took a job in Greenland with the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In 1955, he joined Dames & Moore in Los Angeles, conducting field work in Oregon and Washington.

By the end of 1955, Roy was at a crossroads. His father wanted him to take over Olson Equipment Co., but the option did not interest him, much to his father’s disappointment. Instead, he decided to pursue a doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

In 1956, he rejoined Dames & Moore, this time in San Francisco, where he discovered a successor to his earlier passion for boxing: mountain climbing. Determined to climb Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states, he left San Francisco at 5 p.m. on a Friday. After a 26 mile, 7,500-vertical-foot ascent, he reached the summit, but the descent proved harder. It was a dark night, and he had forgotten a flashlight. He napped along the way and made it back to San Francisco by 2 p.m. Sunday.

After his second year as a Ph.D. student, Roy took a summer job with Woodward-Clyde and Associates in Denver, where he spent many weekends exploring and climbing Colorado’s mountains. Longs Peak became a favorite — a climb he would later share with geotechnical students.

Woodward-Clyde offered him the chance to open an office in Minneapolis. Faced with a career choice — pursue consulting work he loved or complete what he saw as the greater challenge of completing his doctorate — he chose the latter. He completed his Ph.D. in 1960 under the mentorship of Ralph Peck (NAE 1965).

In 1960, Roy was appointed an assistant professor at UIUC. His first research projects, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), focused on the physico-chemical properties of clay. His first archival journal publication, “Shear Strength Properties of Calcium Illite,” appeared in Geotechnique in 1962¹ and set the tone for what followed: carefully conducted experiments, detailed documentation, and rigorous technical analysis. Other early projects continued with the study of consolidation and shearing properties of clays.

Roy’s exceptional contributions were recognized early in his career. He received the Epstein Faculty Achievement Award at UIUC in 1962 and was promoted to associate professor. Over the course of his career, he would receive 12 NSF research grants. At UIUC, he also secured two grants from the U.S. Air Force to assess the shearing and consolidation properties of clays under very high rates of loading, and five grants from the Office of Naval Research to study the shearing properties of deep-ocean sediments. He was promoted to full professor in 1966.

In 1970, Roy was recruited by the Department of Civil Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) to join the department chair, Lymon Reese (NAE 1975), and newly hired Stephen G. Wright. Roy immediately set out to help build the program into a preeminent one while maintaining a very active research portfolio. His research prowess was soon recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which awarded him the 1972 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. The American Society for Testing and Materials followed with its Hogentogler Award in 1973. Perhaps the capstone of his consolidation research was the 1974 paper, “Finite Difference Analyses of Sand Drain Problems,”² which earned ASCE’s Norman Medal, its highest annual award for technical papers across all its publications.

In the early to mid-1980s, Roy’s research shifted toward foundation engineering problems, driven primarily by the challenge of offshore oil platforms being constructed in ever-deeper waters that required high-capacity pile foundations. This work built naturally on his earlier work on consolidation and the shearing properties of clay soils. A 1982 paper, “Failure of an Anchored Bulkhead,”³ earned him the J. James R. Croes Medal from ASCE.

Roy’s foundation research was supported by grants from the American Petroleum Institute, the Texas State Department of Highways, the NSF Offshore Technology Center, the California Department of Transportation, and others. His research produced publications on pile capacity, case histories of pile performance, settlement of piles in clay, and suction piles subjected to uplift. In 1995, he was named the ASCE Terzaghi Lecturer, the society’s highest honor for a geotechnical engineer. His lecture was titled “Settlement of Embankments on Soft Clays.”

Over the course of his career, Roy consulted on nearly 200 projects. He was an especially effective expert witness, able to distill highly technical issues into simple explanations easily understood by judges and juries. He relished the challenge of mental sparring with opposing attorneys, a trait that perhaps connected back to his early passion for boxing.

Roy also had a keen interest in teaching short courses that let him bridge his research with engineering practice. Among the courses he taught over the years were Laboratory Testing in Geotechnical Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and Design of Fixed Offshore Platforms and Behavior of Deep Foundations at UT Austin.

Roy was deeply engaged with professional organizations and strongly encouraged his students to participate in them and attend conferences. He was especially active with ASCE, serving on several standing technical committees and chairing the awards, research, and soil properties committees. He also served on and chaired the Executive Committee for ASCE’s Geotechnical Engineering Division.

In 2003, Roy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering “for furthering our understanding of the properties of clays and for contributions to geotechnical engineering design.”

He will be remembered by colleagues and former students for his dedication to teaching and to the UT Austin geotechnical engineering program. As a teacher, he was a task master who would not tolerate a lack of preparation or thoughtfulness in problem-solving. The high standard he set prepared students well for their careers in geotechnical engineering.

Of all his many career successes, Roy took the greatest pride in the success of his students. He was, above all else, a teacher, and for him the ultimate success was to see a student go on to enjoy a successful career and life.

Students also remember his daily walks around the hallways, when he would duck into graduate student offices to talk. These informal conversations helped make the principles he emphasized — careful, fact-based analytical thinking — second nature. Casual and ordinary though they seemed, these discussions were demanding, especially come examination time, and highly effective in shaping successful engineers.

Roy is survived by his wife of 39 years, Vicki Ray Olson; his children, Sandra Lee Christian, Cheryl Ann Jann, and Chresten E. Olson; his stepdaughters, Grace Ray Peterson and Linda Ray Myers; his grandchildren, Laura Morrison, Ruben C. Guevara, John M. Christian, and Dominic A. Jann; and seven great-grandchildren.

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¹Olson RE. 1962. The shear strength properties of calcium illite. Geotechnique 12(1):23-43.
²Olson RE, Daniel DE, Liu TK. 1974. Finite difference analyses for sand drain problems. Pp. 85-110 in Proceedings of the Conference on Analysis and Design in Geotechnical Engineering, Austin, Texas, June 9-12, 1974. New York: American Society of Civil Engineers.
³Daniel DE, Olson RE. 1982. Failure of an anchored bulkhead. Journal of the Geotechnical Engineering Division 108(10):1318-27.