About

Lorenz G. Straub was born on June 7, 1901 in Kansas City, and passed away in his office on October 27, 1963. He was educated at the University of Illinois where he gained his PhD title in 1930. He stayed during the late 1920s as a Freeman Scholar at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Berlin and thus got acquainted with European hydraulics. During his early career, Straub was engaged with the design of dams and in the translation of a German book on navigation hydraulics. In 1936 he published a noteworthy research work on the Transportation of sediment in suspension.

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In 1930, Straub was appointed professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of Minnesota and director of the Saint-Anthony Falls Laboratory. Together with his colleague Alvin G. Anderson (1911-1975), Straub presented in 1958 original research on uniform flow of air-water flows in chutes. In 1948 he took over as the second IAHR president during the Stockholm IAHR Congress to stay in office for the following seven years. Straub was primarily responsible for the 1953 IAHR Congress held in Minneapolis as a joint ASCE-IAHR meeting. He was elected Honorary Member of IAHR in 1960; Straub had a fatal stroke in 1963 which led to his premature death. The Lorenz G. Straub Award was established in the late 1960s and goes to a PhD student with an outstanding research in hydraulics.