Lawrence V. Johnson
From SPSU Wiki
1907-1997
Lawrence Virgil Johnson was born in Kewanee, IL. He received his BS in Engineering Physics and MS in Physics from Ohio State Universitybefore moving to Atlanta to teach Physics at Georgia Tech in 1931. He served as acting head of Georgia Tech’s Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics from 1942-1945. During the 1945-1946 school year, Professor Johnson took leave from teaching in the U.S. to serve as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Biarritz American University in France. Upon returning home to Georgia, he was named Director of Georgia Tech’s Technical Institute Program, which would later evolve into Southern Polytechnic.
Mr. Johnson served as Director for the Technical Institute from 1948 – 1959. Under his leadership the program moved first to a campus in Chamblee as an extension of Georgia Tech, and then to the campus in Marietta. Johnson stepped down as Director of the Technical Institute in 1959, when he was appointed Director of Georgia Tech’s Engineering Extension Division, and in 1970 he became Associate Dean there.
Professor Johnson also served four terms on the ASEE National Committee of Twenty-One for Technical Institutes, a professional organization dedicated to developing more hands-on, practical approaches to teaching engineering in higher education. To this end he remained dedicated to improving the Institute throughout his career, and in 1963 he received the James H. McGraw Award for outstanding contribution to education in engineering technology in the United States.
In 1998, Southern Polytechnic held a ceremony to dedicate the Lawrence V. Johnson Library to the memory of its first Director.
See Also
American Society for Engineering Education records at the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections. Much of the Professor's correspondence is here along with the papers of his ASEE contemporaries.
A listing of all past recipients of the McGraw Award is maintained by Purdue's College of Technology. Picture listingswere also once associated with this HTML document, but migration from one web platform to another has orphaned the images.
