News and Events - Gorrill-Palmer
Gift Supports Engineering Lab
University of Maine civil engineering
students will have better access to state-of-the art laboratory
equipment thanks to a $75,000 pledge from a Gray company
co-founded by the son of a professor who taught at the Orono
campus for close to 40 years.
The gift from Gorrill-Palmer Consulting
Engineers will be put towards an endowment to maintain and
upgrade the Soil Mechanics Lab in Boardman Hall where each year
approximately 100 students in civil engineering and construction
management technology receive training on how to investigate
subsurface conditions and materials.
“This is one way to give back to the
university. It will help establish a predictable funding stream
that’s independent of the legislative process,” said Thomas
Gorrill, son of UMaine civil engineering professor William
Gorrill who retired in 1986. Thomas Gorrill and his partner, Al
Palmer, founded the engineering company in 1998.
The gift will help ensure that the
UMaine students the company regularly hires are prepared for the
workforce, said Palmer. “We’d like to see that graduates out of
UMaine have a thorough knowledge of the fundamentals in
geotechnical engineering because it’s the basis of all civil
engineering projects,” he said.
In honor of the firm’s generous
contribution the facility has been named the Gorrill-Palmer
Consulting Engineers Soil Mechanics Laboratory. During a
dedication in April, 2007, UMaine President Robert Kennedy
thanked the company and its 24 employees, many of them UMaine
engineering graduates.
“This is really a wonderful example of
how companies in Maine can step up to the plate and make a
lasting difference to the College of Engineering,” Dean Dana
Humphrey said. Gorrill-Palmer is highly regarded in Maine and
throughout northern New England for its transportation
engineering work, he added.
The gift comes as part of UMaine’s $150
million capital campaign – the most ambitious in the history of
the flagship campus -- and makes the third named laboratory in
the civil engineering department and the tenth in the College of
Engineering.
Endowments are more important than ever
because technology becomes obsolete so quickly, according to
Humphrey. “We have to replace our equipment on a much more
frequent basis and we need to have endowments like Gorrill-Palmer
to provide that critical level of support,” he said.
A faculty member in UMaine’s civil
engineering department for nearly 40 years, William Gorrill
taught soil courses and was instrumental in hiring Humphrey as
his replacement, the interim dean recalled.
The gift “is just a wonderful
connection between father and son,” Humphrey said
His father
“probably would be very pleased” about the gift, said Gorrill,
who has maintained close ties with UMaine over the years. He is
a member of the Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering advisory board. And he has been a guest speaker at
the Orono campus on numerous occasions.
“The gift is going to be huge for us,”
said Eric Landis, interim chair of the civil engineering
department, noting that a first-rate lab would help recruit top
faculty and students.
“We want to be a state-of-the-art
facility and this will help us do that,” he said.
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