Prof. John Lippold
Autobiography
I was born at Sisters Hospital in Buffalo NY in 1951. When I was one, we moved to the dairy farming country of western New York State between Buffalo and Rochester. My father is a World War II veteran and worked for the New York Telephone Company for 42 years. My mother was born in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) region of Germany and moved to the U.S. in 1924 when she was 3 years old. She graduated from high school at 17 as the valedictorian and went on to become a grade school teacher. My grandfathers actually fought against each other in eastern France during World War I.
I attended St. Vincent's Grade School in Attica NY. I spent my youth playing sports (baseball and golf), working on my grandfather's dairy farm, and pursuing academic endeavors. After graduating as valedictorian from Notre Dame High School in Batavia NY, I decided to pursue an engineering degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. It wasn't until my junior year that I chose to specialize in Materials Engineering and I graduated with a B.S. degree in 1973. During my senior year, I was fortunate to make the acquaintance of Professor Warren Savage who at that time was one of the foremost welding metallurgists in the world. He invited me to join his research group and I stayed at RPI to earn both M.S. and PhD degrees in Materials Engineering. While I was working on my PhD, I had the pleasure of sharing an office with Bud Baeslack who is now the Dean of Engineering at OSU.
After graduation I took a job at Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore CA as a member of the technical staff, specializing in the area of stainless steel and high alloy weldability. The work there included projects involving nuclear weapons, solar energy, and fusion energy technology. In 1985, I left Sandia and take a position at the newly-formed Edison Welding Institute (EWI). Part of the attraction was the EWI relationship with Ohio State University (OSU) and the opportunity to teach and advise students as an adjunct professor in the Welding Engineering department. In 1995, I left EWI to join the fulltime faculty of the Welding Engineering Program. In addition to my academic duties, I also directed the National Excellence in Materials Joining Education and Training (NEMJET) program at OSU. Currently, I am leading an effort that has developed a distance education Welding Engineering degree program. This MSWE program was launched in 2003 and currently offers 18 online courses.
Over the past 25 years, I have been actively involved in research programs designed to gain a better understanding of the welding metallurgy and weldability of engineering materials. This has included the evaluation of weldability test techniques and the development of technology that helps solve engineering problems associated with welding. Based on this research, I have published over 150 technical papers and reports and made over 300 technical presentations. I have been fortunate to have attracted many talented graduate students into my research group at OSU. Since joining OSU in 1995, I have advised over 35 graduate students, many of whom have moved on to prominent positions in both industry and academia.
Thanks to these students and fruitful technical collaborations with my coworkers, I have won a number of awards from professional organizations. These include the following from the American Welding Society: the Charles H. Jennings Memorial Award (1977 and 1980), the William Spraragen Memorial Award (1979 and 1992), the Warren F. Savage Memorial Award (1993 and 1999), the McKay-Helm Award (1994 and 1996), the A.F. Davis Silver Medal (2000), and the Lincoln Gold Medal (1983), the Adams Memorial Membership Award (1997), the Plummer Memorial Educational Lecture Award (2002), and the William Irrgang Award (2002). I was also the recipient of Buehler Technical Paper Merit Award (1985 and 1989) from the International Metallographic Society. In 1994, I was elected a Fellow of ASM and in 1996 became a Fellow of AWS. In 1997, I was honored to be selected to give the Comfort A. Adams Memorial Lecture at the AWS Annual Convention in Los Angeles. I remain active in a number of technical societies and serve on various technical committees.
In 2003, I began work on a textbook entitled Welding Metallurgy and Weldability of Stainless Steels. My co-author is Dr. Damian Kotecki, an internationally acclaimed welding expert at The Lincoln Electric Company. This book is scheduled to be published in early 2005 by Wiley Interscience, Inc.
In 1981, I made the acquaintance of Mary Juhas, who at the time was a metallurgical engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She had previously earned a B.S. in Chemistry at Seton Hill College and an M.S in Materials Science at Carnegie-Mellon University. We were married in 1982. After moving to Columbus in 1985, she enrolled in the Material Science and Engineering PhD program at OSU and earned her degree in 1989. In 1989-1990, we spent a year in Paris working at the University of Paris and French Welding Institute. Mary is currently a Senior Assistant Dean for Outreach and Special Programs in the College of Engineering at OSU.
