Eugene L. Grant

Eugene Lodewick Grant (February 15, 1897 – July 9, 1996), was an American civil engineer and educator. He graduated with a BS from the University of Wisconsin in 1917. He started teaching in 1920 at Montana State University and then in 1930 at the School of Engineering, Stanford University where he taught until 1962. He is known for his work in Engineering Economics with his textbook first published in 1930. Grant was the intellectual heir of work performed by John Charles Lounsbury Fish who published Engineering Economics: First Principles in 1923, providing the critical bridge between Grant and the pioneering effort of Arthur M. Wellington in his engineering economics work of the 1870s.

Grant was awarded many academic and professional honors such as an honorary doctorate in civil engineering at Montana State University; Fellow of the American Statistical Association, American Society for Quality(ASQ) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as membership in the National Academy of Engineering in 1987.^[1] He was part of the effort to found the American Society for Quality which awarded Grant its top award, the Shewhart Medal in 1952. In 1967, ASQ created the E.L. Grant Award which is granted annually to the individual who has been deemed to have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the areas of educational programs in quality. Joseph Juran said that Grant was a "quiet doer who didn't receive enough credit for what he did" and did much to advance the field of quality to what it was in the middle of the 20th century.^[2]