By: Melody Simmons

Willard Hackerman, the politically connected civil engineer whose Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. built local landmarks like Ravens Stadium, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture and the Walters Art Museum, will soon get a structural namesake of his own.

On Sept. 15, Johns Hopkins University will name its computational science and engineering building Hackerman Hall.

Hackerman, 91, graduated from Hopkins in 1938. He is also a former trustee and he led efforts in 1979 to launch an engineering school at Hopkins, which was named after G.W.C. Whiting, who founded Whiting-Turner in 1909. Whiting-Turner’s first project on the Hopkins campus was in 1914.

The soon-to-be Hackerman Hall opened in 2008 on the Homewood campus and houses the Institute for Computational Medicine, the Center for Speech and Language Processing, the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, and the Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology.

Hackerman and his wife, Lillian, 90, have been major donors in the city for decades. In 2005, they established the Hackerman Polytechnic Scholarships, which provide four years of studies for graduates of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where Hackerman graduated from high school.