Past Forums

2004 Ohio Student Research Forum
August 19-20, Ohio State University

SPEAKER
Oliver G. McGee III, Ph.D., Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science,
Ohio State University

Dr. Oliver G. McGee III is a teacher, a researcher, an administrator, and an advisor to government. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Geodetic Science (CEEGS) at The Ohio State University. The department has 44 permanent and active emeritus faculty positions, 43 administrative and 77 auxiliary support staff, and over 450 students. McGee’s responsibilities involve administrative management, oversight, and executive leadership of the CEEGS academic department, including academic policy, business administration strategy, human resources, financial planning, investments and valuation, operations, and marketing, development and communications. He also has fiscal responsibility for managing an annual operating budget of over $5 million, R&D expenditures of over $13.5 million, and an endowment fund of over $12 million. Broader ranges of his administrative responsibilities include fund-raising, revising curriculum, long-range strategic planning, increasing research efforts, and managing faculty and staff performance review and professional development.

McGee’s early accomplishments in his present position include eliminating in FY01-02 the department’s FY99-FY06 operating budget deficits totaling in FY01 at $1.2 million (the department currently is in service at a surplus operating budget). During his tenure as chair, he has administered an $8 million increase in the department’s R&D annual budget, a $290,000 increase in the department’s endowment fund, and a 20% increase in the department’s student enrollment. He has established for the department an integrated finance, operations, marketing, development and communications strategy and administrative structure, and has put measures in place inside two years that removed the department’s probationary status with the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) found when he came on-board. His measures have included appointing three faculty-endowed chair positions and hiring four regular faculty positions, resulting in a highly diverse academic department with the most women faculty in the OSU College of Engineering, and including the first woman assistant professor named to an endowed chair professorship in the department’s 125-year history. He led the department’s scenario-based planning effort resulting in a ten-year strategic plan, and has initiated the CEEGS Department’s Scholar-Professorship Endowment Campaign. He also established the department’s $20,000 newly renovated Clyde T. Morris Memorial Lobby, which recognizes the outstanding former CEEGS department chair (1938-1944) and distinguished civil engineering alumnus. During McGee’s tenure as CEEGS Chair, four assistant professors have received prestigious national honors: one, a 2001 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from United States (U.S.) President George W. Bush, two others, a 2002 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, and another, a NASA New Investigator Program Award; and five CEEGS staff members each received in FY01 McGee’s newly created “Find The Good and Praise It” departmental staff award, and three of them each received in FY01, FY02, and FY03 the OSU Engineering Dean’s “Above and Beyond” Award – the College’s top staff award.

McGee is the former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Technology Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). Appointed by former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton, McGee served as the lead direct report to former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater with primary responsibility for management, oversight, and executive coordination of technology policy and programs across the ten modal transportation administrations of the U.S. DOT – totaling to approximately $5 billion annually for research and development of the nation’s complex transportation systems.

At the U.S. DOT, McGee led the interagency team primarily responsible for the development, preparation and coordination of the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) National R&D Plan for Aviation Safety, Security, Efficiency & Environmental Compatibility – the FAA, NASA & DOD joint plan to implement the $1.3B FY01 R&D investment recommendations of former President Clinton’s 1997 Commission on Aviation Safety & Security, chaired by former Vice President Albert Gore. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater at the “Aviation in the 21st Century – Beyond Open Skies Ministerial” in Chicago, Illinois launched this plan on December 6, 1999. McGee served as co-chair of the NSTC Committee on Technology Wire Systems Safety Interagency Working Group, which resulted in the White House policy document, Review of Federal Programs for Wire Systems Safety, aimed to benchmark agency efforts to optimize Federal R&D leading to a national strategy for wire system safety in response to the Gore Commission on Aviation Safety & Security. He also led the teams responsible for the development and preparation of the 2025 national transportation policy reports, Transportation Decision Making – Policy Architecture for the 21st Century and The Changing Face of Transportation both released in January 2001. His leadership in this effort resulted in his teams of federal government career staff receiving the 2000 U.S. Secretary of Transportation’s Partnership for Excellence Award – the second highest award within the Federal Department. This award recognizes department-wide intermodal teams/groups that have used partnership models to support one or more DOT strategic plan goals.

McGee came to the U.S. DOT after serving an 18-month appointment as Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Inside the Clinton White House he had oversight and interagency coordination responsibility for a number of national science and technology policy issues, which included aviation safety and security; aviation science and aeronautical technologies; university-government partnerships; pre-college science and mathematics education; human resources and workforce development in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology; Presidential Mentoring Awards; and Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He led OSTP’s contribution to the President’s Initiative on Race, which resulted in the White House policy document, Meeting America’s Needs for the Scientific and Technological Challenges of the Twenty-First Century – A White House Roundtable Dialogue for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

McGee has also held a number of faculty appointments and research positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, and the University of Arizona. He came to higher education with industrial-sector experience from engineering positions held at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field and Boeing (formerly McDonnell Douglas) Helicopter Company. He has received numerous national and state teaching and engineering awards including a 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 1993 NASA Faculty Award for Research, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) & the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's 1995 Georgia Professor of the Year, and U.S. Black Engineer Magazine's 1996 Black Engineer of the Year Award, Education College-Level. He has authored numerous research journal articles on subjects ranging from interdisciplinary design synthesis and vibration control of mechanical and structural systems to aeromechanics and control of dynamic flow instabilities in air-breathing propulsion systems used for aircraft. He is on the Board of Editors of the international journal, Computer Modeling in Engineering and Sciences.

McGee is a former member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Engineering, and a former member of The Ohio State University’s Alumni Advisory Council and its College of Engineering Board of Advisors. He currently serves on the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Body of Knowledge Committee of the Task Committee on Academic Prerequisites for Professional Practice, resulting in the 2004 report, “Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century”. The Faculty of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University recognized him with its 2000 Distinguished Alumnus Award for “distinguished achievement and eminent contributions to the advancement of the engineering profession and related fields of activity.”

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, McGee earned his first dollar as a hamburger flipper at a neighborhood McDonald’s! As a teenager, he developed a talent as a cellist and earned coveted positions in the Cincinnati Youth Symphony Orchestra and the All-Ohio State Fair Youth Orchestra. He is a graduate of Woodward High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest public high school west of the Appalachian Mountains. A former Drum Major of The Ohio State University Marching Band in 1980, McGee later in 1981 graduated from The Ohio State University in civil engineering. He also received a M.S. degree in civil engineering in 1983, and a Ph.D. degree in engineering mechanics (with a minor in aerospace engineering) in 1988, both from the University of Arizona, and a M.B.A. degree in 2004 from the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business (GSB). McGee also served on the executive gift committee of his M.B.A. class that resulted in the first class in the history of the University of Chicago GSB to attain the goal of 100% participation in substantial gifting to The Chicago GSB Fund.

McGee earned a Certificate of Professional Development (C.P.D.) in 2001 from the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he has studied advanced engineering technologies at the University of Cambridge (England), Stanford University, and the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Brussels, Belgium. He has also completed numerous professional development programs at The Aspen Institute, Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, The White House Senior Leadership Conference III for Presidential Appointees and Nominees (sponsored by the Council for Excellence in Government), the American Association of State Colleges & Universities’ (AASCU) Millennium Leadership Institute Fellows Program for educational management for prospective chancellors and presidents, and The Directors’ Consortium on the fundamentals of corporate governance and board service (jointly sponsored by the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School, and The Wharton School).