Henry Petroski

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Henry Petroski

Henry Petroski (born 1942) is an American civil engineering professor at Duke University where he specializes in failure analysis. He is a prolific author, having written a dozen books - most notably To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985) - including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silverware. He is a frequent lecturer, and a weekly contributor to the journal American Scientist.

Petroski was born in Brooklyn, New York, and in 1963, he received his bachelor's degree from Manhattan College. He graduated with his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1968. Before beginning his work at Duke in 1980, he worked at the University of Texas at Austin from 1968-74 and for the Argonne National Laboratory from 1975-80.

He has received honorary degrees from Clarkson University, Trinity College, Valparaiso University and Manhattan College. He is a registered professional engineer in Texas, a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

In 2004, he was appointed to the United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board [1].