Wellbaum honored as top engineer of the year

Michael Wellbaum, a professional engineer with Teague Nall and Perkins, was named 2010 Engineer of the Year by the Fort Worth Chapter of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers.

Wellbaum will be honored during a banquet Feb. 20 at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in downtown Fort Worth, along with Young Engineer of the Year David Burkett and Autumn Putsch-Permenter, this year’s recipient of the Richard Van Trump Award.

The local awards banquet will culminate National Engineers Week, an annual nationwide celebration of the engineering profession, Feb. 14-20.

Other local winners are Joseph Truett (J.T.) Auldridge, Fort Worth Branch of American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2010 Edmund Friedman Young Engineer of the Year, and Engineer of the Year James C. Williams and Young Engineer of the Year Priya Mydur of the DFW/Mid-Cities Chapter of TSPE.

Wellbaum is a native of Brazos County and a 1996 graduate of Texas A&M University with a degree in civil engineering. He joined Teague Nall and Perkins in 2003 as a project manager in the firm’s corporate office in downtown Fort Worth. His areas of specialty include water and wastewater system facility design, storm drain design, site development and roadway design. During his career, Wellbaum has designed water pump stations and storage tanks, roadways, wastewater facilities and drainage systems.

Currently, Wellbaum is developing an intra-company energy services group with a focus on natural gas pipeline design. His experience includes natural gas pipelines and natural gas compressor station projects across the Metroplex and other areas of the state. Active in professional and civic societies, Wellbaum is a past president of the Fort Worth Chapter TSPE and currently serves as state director. He has served as a volunteer on MATHCOUNTS – a national math enrichment, coaching and competition program that promotes middle school mathematics achievement – for the past 12 years and serves on the state MATHCOUNTS committee.

Wellbaum also serves on the board of directors of the Texas Boys Choir and is president of the Texas Boys Choir Parents Club. He also is a past president of the St. Christopher Episcopal School Board.

A native of Midland, Burkett graduated from Texas Tech University in 2001 with a degree in civil engineering. He joined the Carter & Burgess Transportation Group in Fort Worth in 2002, working on a variety of Texas Department of Transportation and municipal transportation projects.

Burkett came on board at Halff Associates Inc. in 2004 and, after obtaining his professional engineering license in 2007, now is managing municipal, public works and site development projects for the firm’s Fort Worth office. One of his more notable projects was the civil design for a 248-acre reclamation site in the Clear Fork Trinity River flood plain. The site was developed into the Railroad Athletic Complex in the city of Lewisville, and is the single largest capital project in the city’s history with a construction cost of more than $20 million.

Burkett has served as the chapter’s MATHCOUNTS coordinator for the past five years and as a volunteer at the state MATHCOUNTS competition.

Originally from Shreveport, Putsch-Permenter graduated from Louisiana Tech University in 2006 with a degree in civil engineering. After graduation, she joined Halff Associates in Fort Worth, where she has worked in the transportation group on various design projects for local municipalities and United States Army Corps of Engineers and TxDOT projects, including geometric paving design, water, wastewater and storm drain design.

She has served the local TSPE chapter as vice president-public relations and director of chapter development as well as the volunteer coordinator of MATHCOUNTS for the past three years. An active member of the Fort Worth Branch of ASCE, Putsch-Permenter has served as hospitality co-chair for two years. She also delivers meals for Meals On Wheels and volunteers at the North Tarrant Food Bank.

Auldridge began his career with Garcia & Associates Inc. in Fort Worth after graduating from Texas A&M with a degree in civil engineering, with an emphasis in transportation. During his tenure there, he worked on notable local transportation projects such as Southwest Parkway/State Highway 183, now a portion of the North Tarrant Express; DFW Connector, Lancaster Avenue improvements, East Rosedale Street and FM 156 relocation near Alliance Airport. He also has been involved with the Dallas Cowboys Stadium and the Trinity Parkway in Dallas. In 2006, he obtained his professional engineering license and was promoted to project manager.

In 2009, Auldridge joined civil engineering firm Brown & Gay Engineers Inc. in Fort Worth, where he has focused on transportation and public works projects. He is involved in the firm’s current TxDOT North Region/Fort Worth Project Oversight Engineer contract on the North Tarrant Express corridor.

Auldridge currently serves as branch director of the Fort Worth Branch of ASCE. As Younger Member Group Chair in 2008, he organized a golf tournament between the Fort Worth and Dallas branches that raised more than $6,500 for scholarships for local college students.

Williams is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, and has been on the faculty since 1986. He hails from Albuquerque, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from the University of New Mexico. He worked as a traffic engineer for five years in the Austin headquarters of TxDOT before graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a doctorate in civil engineering, specializing in transportation.

Williams has been at UT-Arlington since graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and teaches traffic engineering and other transportation-related topics. He also teaches the freshman engineering class and supervises a group of students in senior projects each semester.

Williams is the faculty adviser for the UT-Arlington ASCE Student Chapter and the UT-Arlington chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society. He is a member of the national ASCE Committee on Student Activities and a member of the rules committee for the National Student Steel Bridge Competition, co-sponsored by ASCE and AISC. The administrator for Texas District Institute of Transportation Engineers, Williams was TexITE’s transportation engineer of the year in 2005.

Mydur, a graduate of UT-Arlington’s College of Civil Engineering, has been employed with Wier & Associates Inc. for four years, starting as a college intern, and now serving as a graduate engineer in the Arlington office.

During her tenure with Wier, Mydur has participated in the design of several land development and municipal infrastructure design projects. She serves as secretary of the Mid-Cities Chapter of TSPE and as the coordinator of MATHCOUNTS.

National Engineers Week Foundation is a formal coalition of more than 100 engineering, professional and technical societies and more than 50 corporations and government agencies. A fundamental part of Engineers Week is to help raise public awareness and appreciation of the engineering profession and engineers’ contributions to society.

Engineers Week was founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers and is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering work force by encouraging an interest in engineering and technology careers among young students, and by promoting pre-college literacy in math and science.