The standards field's highest honors: Donald N. Heirman, born and raised here

1995 · 1997 · 2003 · 2008 · 2017 · 2018

The honors: Donald Nestor Heirman was born in Mishawaka on 16 August 1940 and raised here, the son of a Uniroyal foreman, a Mishawaka High School graduate who took his engineering degrees at Purdue and spent thirty years at Bell Laboratories becoming the world's standards authority in electromagnetic compatibility — "Mr. EMC Standards," as his field named him. The honors at the end of that course are the highest his profession gives, and they are entered here at award size. In November 2008, at the General Meeting of the International Electrotechnical Commission in São Paulo, he received the IEC Lord Kelvin Award — the Commission's highest honor, given for exceptional contributions to global electrotechnical standardization. The IEEE's own recipients list gives him the Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award for 1997, shared with L. John Rankine, with the citation "for contributions and leadership in developing electromagnetic compatibility standards"; the IEEE added its Richard M. Emberson Award in 2018. The American National Standards Institute's record carries two more: the Finegan Standards Medal in 2003 and the Elihu Thomson Electrotechnology Medal in 2017. The IEEE EMC Society's Richard R. Stoddart Award for outstanding contributions came in 1995, and the IEEE made him a Life Fellow. No other person on this city's ledger holds the summit award of a world standards body; the Lord Kelvin Award is the entry this section is built around, after the Rhodes.

The cross-reference: The Halls of Fame section of this history tested Heirman for the national engineering halls of fame and found none — his name stands in no hall, and that negative stands there at full size. It does not diminish this entry: the honors above are the granting bodies' own awards, verified on the grantors' records, and a man can hold his field's highest awards without a hall. The two files keep their separate questions — halls there, honors here — and each prints its own answer.

Sources:

1. IEEE biography of Donald N. Heirman (IEEE vTools / IEEETV record) — the Lord Kelvin Award presented at the IEC General Meeting, São Paulo, November 2008, as the IEC's highest award for contributions to standardization in EMC; the Bell Labs course and the CISPR and IEC committee chairs.
2. IEEE, official recipients list of the Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award (corporate-awards.ieee.org) — 1997, L. John Rankine and Donald N. Heirman, with the citation as printed above.
3. IEEE Honors Ceremony record, 2018 — the Richard M. Emberson Award; IEEE Spectrum, obituary of Heirman, 2020 — the Emberson citation and the career.
4. American National Standards Institute, memorial notice for Heirman, 2 November 2020 — the Mishawaka birth, the Finegan Medal, the Elihu Thomson Medal, and the death on 30 October 2020.
5. Purdue University, Donald N. Heirman papers collection — the degrees, the Bell Labs laboratory he founded and managed, and the standards career.
6. The Halls of Fame section of this history — the negative hall test for Heirman, printed there in full.