Memorial to Alice Standish Allen, Honorary Member (1907-2002)

Abstract

We have lost the woman we believe to have been the first female engineering geologist in North America. Elected Honorary Member of the Association of Engineering Geologists (AEG) in 1987, Alice served her entire professional career as an engineering geologist. She began her work with the federal government beginning in 1936, one of the first of a long line that had begun only in 1934 with Federal Works Progress projects. Alice was a native of Boston; she was brought up at Newtonville, MA, then Lexington, MA. She completed a bachelor of arts degree in geology at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. Alice completed a master's degree at Wisconsin and all but her dissertation at Northwestern, both in geology, and then took employment with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1936. She served in Washington, DC, until her retirement in 1982. During this time she was one of the first members of the USGS Military Geology Unit (1942), then the Engineering Geology Branch, then Office of Chief of Engineers, U.S. Army, and finally the resident subsidence-mitigation expert at headquarters of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. At the USGS, no doubt as a result of her association at the University of Wisconsin, Alice was selected to act as the Staff Secretary to the Committee on Geologic Names, setting up the formal stratigraphic nomenclature to be reviewed and passed on by the Committee. Additionally, she slaved through all Survey manuscripts to ensure that stratigraphic nomenclature and …