Kieffer snares a top engineering honor

Published by admin on Tue, 05/12/2020 - 7:36am

    Kara Kieffer of Ogden was selected as the Civil Engineering Outstanding Senior for the fall 2018 semester, and was recognized at the commencement ceremony Saturday, December 15.
   Kieffer is a graduating senior in Iowa State University’s Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering (ISU CCEE). She is a 2014 OHS graduate and the daughter of Bob and Lisa Kieffer. She appears to be following in her father’s footsteps.
   Her father is also an ISU graduate with a civil engineering degree and served as Boone County Engineer.

The following is courtesy of
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
   Kara Kieffer graduated with a 3.51 GPA and was nominated by Chris Rehmann, associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering.
   At Iowa State, Kieffer was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers student chapter, the program for Women in Science and Engineering and served as an engineering career fair ambassador.
   In a project led by Zachary Hans, a research engineer at Iowa State’s Institute for Transportation, Kieffer performed research on intersections across Iowa to locate and record attributes to be used for crash analysis.
   Kieffer has been involved in several competition teams, where she designed and fabricated a bridge as part of the Steel Bridge team and designed a 5-foot tall balsa skyscraper that survived a shake table test in Los Angeles with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

She is also president of CCEE Ladies, a club designed to help women in civil and construction engineering connect and network.
Kieffer gives back to her community through the Greater Des Moines Habitat for Humanity, volunteering for the FIRST LEGO League competition at ISU, the Iowa High School Science Bowl, as a small group leader at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church for two years, with the Catholic Daughters of the Americas and on a “Collegiate Challenge” service trip with Habitat for Humanity to Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Read more in the Dec. 19 issue of The Ogden Reporter.