The Steel Framing Alliance, Washington, D.C., celebrated its 10th anniversary in October at METALCON International in Baltimore. Dr. Esmael Adibi, an economist from Chapman University, Orange, Calif., discussed the state of the economy and its impact on today’s construction activity at the anniversary dinner. The Cold-Formed Steel Engineer’s Institute, which serves as the technical council to the SFA, presented its inaugural Award for Innovative Design. “The SFA had a big challenge in its early days,” says Don Moody, chairman of SFA’s board of directors. “Outside of the prescriptive method and a handful of technical notes, there weren’t many resources available for someone looking to get started in the steelframing industry.
But now 10 years later, a solid infrastructure of codes, standards, design guides, training resources, and a common standard for specifying and identifying steel is firmly in place.” In other SFA news, Mark Nowak has been appointed to serve as acting president while SFA’s board of directors continues a formal search for a permanent replacement for Larry Williams, who has accepted a market development position with the International Iron and Steel Institute in Brussels, Belgium. Nowak has worked closely with SFA for several years and has been leading its technology and codes program since 2007. He will be responsible for managing SFA’s day-to-day operations, in addition to strategic initiatives that support SFA’s mission to facilitate the growth of steel framing in the construction marketplace. For more information, visit www. steelframing.org.