Dean E. Stephan
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An experienced hire from South San Francisco-based Guy F. Atkinson who joined Pankow in 1972, Dean Stephan held various executive management positions until his retirement in 1997.
Stephan earned a B.S. degree in civil engineering from Stanford University and a B.A. degree in business administration from Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. After graduating from Stanford in 1961, Stephan served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps. In 1966 he joined Guy F. Atkinson.
Stephan joined Charles Pankow, Inc. (CPI) as a project sponsor. For six years, he handled the Winmar account. Winmar, the real estate arm of Seattle-based Safeco Insurance, was CPI’s most important client: Pankow constructed some two dozen projects for the company over the course of two decades.
Charlie Pankow then promoted him to vice president in charge of Pankow Construction Company, a subsidiary of CPI, which by the late 1970s had become a holding company for various entities.
In the early 1980s, Stephan became general manager with responsibility for the company’s operations on the Mainland. With the reorganization of the company, completed in 1986, Stephan became executive vice president of the new entity, Charles Pankow Builders, Ltd. (CPBL).
In 1993, on its thirtieth anniversary, Stephan became president of CPBL. He succeeded Charlie Pankow, who remained CEO and chairman of the board. Stephan served for almost four years, before retiring in May 1997.
In 1994 Stephan was named president of the American Concrete Institute, becoming the second of three members of the Pankow firm to hold this position. (Charlie Pankow was president in 1980; Thomas D. Verti held the post in 2006.) The honor recognized Stephan’s contribution to developing uses for concrete in various construction applications, as evidenced in part by the more than twenty articles that he published on the subject.
The ACI recognized in particular Stephan’s role in championing the development of the precast hybrid moment-resistant frame (PHMRF), a significant advance in the construction of tall concrete buildings in seismic zones. An outgrowth of the joint U.S.-Japan Seismic Structural Systems Program (PRESSS) of the late 1980s, the PHMRF research program was a major undertaking for the company. Developed jointly by CPBL, the University of Washington, structural engineers John A. Martin & Associates, and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute for Standards and Technology, the PHMRF was introduced to the commercial market in the wake of the 1994 earthquake that hit Northridge, California, which was especially timely. After using it to construct several parking structures, CPBL deployed the PHMRF on the Paramount, a 39-story residential tower that was the tallest concrete building in Seismic Zone 4 when it was completed in San Francisco in 2001.
Stephan also served as chairman of both the corporate advisory board of the Civil Engineering Research Foundation and the committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers that investigated the fatal collapse of concrete walkways at the Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri on 17 July 1981.
