Academy of Distinguished Alumni
Bruce R. Bates,
B.S. 1979, M.S. 1981
RISA Technologies

Bruce R. Bates received both his B.S. and M.S. from the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He began his career in 1981 as a structural engineer at Fluor Corporation in Irvine, California. After a year he pursued an opportunity to move into the computer systems department at Fluor, joining a group that developed and supported Fluor’s SAP-IV mainframe structural analysis software.

Around that time a revolution called the IBM-PC was happening in computer technology. Fluor acquired a supply of Personal Computers and Mr. Bates was assigned the task of figuring out what, if anything, these new contraptions could do for the structural engineering department. In collaboration with the structural engineering group he developed a program called PC-Frame, the first computer program of its kind that combined an interactive spreadsheet interface with a matrix based frame solver. This was quite revolutionary at the time and PC- Frame was very popular with the structural engineers at Fluor. Based on that popularity Mr. Bates approached his managers with the idea that PC-Frame should be sold by Fluor as a commercial application. After being rebuffed, he left Fluor and started developing structural analysis software independently. In 1987 he founded RISA Technologies and subsequently released RISA-2D, a DOS based two dimensional analysis and design program.

For purposes of marketing RISA-2D Mr. Bates went door to door among structural design firms all over southern California. He personally visited well over 100 firms in Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego, demonstrating RISA-2D at each office and hopefully closing a sale. The software proved to be a success.

Almost immediately RISA-2D clients began suggesting that Mr. Bates should develop a three-dimensional program that matched the intuitiveness of RISA-2D. In 1990 he began development of RISA-3D, a more sophisticated three dimensional program. RISA-3D was released in 1993 and RISA Technologies began to grow more quickly. This enabled him to begin hiring other engineers and start adding additional products such as RISAFloor, RISAFoundation and RISAConnection while continuing to expand and improve RISA-3D.

Today RISA-3D is the most widely used structural analysis and design software in the United States and it has been for more than ten years. RISA products are used by thousands of firms in the US and abroad to design buildings, tunnels, roller coasters, petrochemical facilities, soccer stadiums, airports, and everything in between.

Besides developing structural software, Mr. Bates is on the board of directors for eLend Solutions, Inc. in Mission Viejo, CA, BQES, Inc. in Torrance, CA, and Tell The Boss, Inc., in San Clemente, CA. He completed two terms of service on the Civil and Environmental Engineering Alumni Board and he is currently serving on the College of Engineering’s Committee of 100. He has been actively involved in leadership positions with the YMCA Adventure Princess program and spent a few years coaching girl’s youth soccer, a sport he knows practically nothing about.

Mr. Bates will be celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary this year with his wife Lisa, a graduate of the University of California at Irvine. They have three daughters; Carly, a 2015 graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Makensie, a third year student at the University of California at San Diego, and Sierra, a first year student at Point Loma Nazarene University. Bruce and Lisa recently relocated to Laguna Beach, California.