by Anna McClure | Jan 7, 2015 | News Slider
Students in the College of Engineering plan to construct a bridge on campus in just a few weeks. This prototype bridge will be built in the quad outside the Hughes Center, and the parts will be shipped to Honduras and rebuilt during a mission trip this spring. Once in Honduras, the bridge will allow grade school students to safely cross a highway on their school campus. According to Kerry Patterson, associate professor of engineering, the road will become the main access to a new port facility and will likely become busier in the future, making the bridge more needed. The team of student volunteers, co-led by alumni Luke Burris and Ethan Johnson, will have the parts manufactured in America. But for now, construction of the prototype is being held off until approval from the Honduran government. “Once we have approval, it will be about 4-5 weeks before we will be ready to build the bridge on campus,” Patterson said. Construction of the campus bridge should begin in February. The campus bridge will be over 100 feet long and one to two feet off the ground, but the official bridge will be 4 feet wide and nearly 8 feet tall to allow traffic to pass under it. Between 15 and 20 students will travel to Honduras to construct the bridge. The project will be done in partnership with Honduras Outreach Inc., a non-profit mission...
by Emily Snell | Nov 28, 2012 | Uncategorized
After a successful career in military defense engineering, Kerry Patterson thought he’d arrive at age 65 and start sitting “on the porch in a rocking chair somewhere.” But now that he’s reached retirement age, Patterson says he’ll keep teaching classes and going on engineering missions trips as long as he can. Patterson, who started teaching engineering at Lipscomb nearly 10 years ago, said he entered education as an escape from the “commercial rat race.” According to Patterson, his old friend from the University of Tennessee Fred Gillam, former head of Lipscomb’s Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering, called one day to encourage Patterson to join the teaching staff at Lipscomb. “When I interviewed with the provost for the position,” Patterson said, “Dr. Bledsoe said, ‘I don’t really think I have much choice because I promised your friend that a condition of his taking the job was that he had to be able to hire you.’” After a three-year stint in the U.S. Army missile command, Patterson spent 25 years doing work related to military ballistic missile defense systems. But Patterson said education had been a possibility in the back of his mind for years. “I always thought that sometime down the road I’d like to teach and I’d like to teach in a Christian university,” he said. “But since there weren’t very many Church of Christ schools that had engineering, I thought I would probably have to settle for math or physics. When this college of engineering thing came along, it was an even better situation than I had anticipated.” Patterson said he knew when he came to Lipscomb that he...
