The Steel Framing Industry Association announced that Jay Larson, P.E., F.ASCE, formerly with the American Iron and Steel Institute, has been appointed secretariat of the newly formed SFIA Standards Committee.

As secretariat, Larson will be responsible for overseeing the development of standards related to the cold-formed steel framing industry, which will make use of the Canvass Method of industry participation.

Larson has extensive experience with structural steel and CFS framing. He began his career in 1979 as a civil/structural engineer for Bethlehem Steel. Thereafter, he had roles in construction engineering, facilities engineering, sales and marketing, the latter involving the marketing of coated sheet steel (galvanized and Galvalume) for construction. In 1991, Larson became vice chair of the AISI Committee on Specifications. In 1998, he became the first chair of the AISI Committee on Framing Standards. In 2003, Larson moved to AISI, where he served as secretary of the COFS. In 2008, after the COS and the COFS were combined, Larson was appointed secretary of the AISI Standards Council.

“We are excited to welcome Jay to our standards development team,” said Don Allen, SFIA executive director. “His expertise is a perfect fit for the work we will be doing, advocating for the development of favorable cold-formed steel code provisions.”

Assisting Larson on the SFIA Standards Committee will be Meredith Perez as committee administrator. Perez, SFIA’s program manager, has prior experience in developing standards at the Canadian Standards Association, serving on the National Building Code of Canada Standing Committee for Small Buildings and Housing and working for the Canadian Sheet Steel Building Institute.

The SFIA Standards Committee invites individuals interested in participating in the standards development process to complete a survey by Nov. 29.

Currently, the SFIA Standards Committee, which will give approval to the actions of the canvass groups, consists of Pat Ford, P.E., S.E., committee chair and SFIA technical director; Roger A. LaBoube, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, distinguished teaching professor of civil engineering and director of the Wei-Wen Yu Center for Cold-Formed Steel Structures at the University of Missouri-Rolla; Greg Ralph, vice president at ClarkDietrich and chair of the SFIA Code Compliance Committee; Jeff Klaiman, P.E., principal at ADTEK Engineers and chair of the SFIA Technical Committee; Benjamin W. Schafer, Ph.D., P.E., the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Professor of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University; Bill Babich, P.E., director of engineering at the TrusSteel Division of Alpine Engineered Products, Inc.; and Rob Madsen, P.E., senior project engineer at Devco Engineering, Inc.