Orville Kofoid was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1909. Kofoid graduated from Oregon State College in 1932 with a BS in civil engineering. He worked for the Oregon State Highway Department from 1932 until 1939; during that time, he was assigned occasional projects at Oregon State College. From 1940 to 1946, Kofoid worked for the 13th Naval District Headquarters in Seattle. He returned to Corvallis in 1947 as an Associate Professor in the Civil Engineering Department, a post he held until 1966. Kofoid died in King County, Washington, in 1994.
Alumnus and faculty member, Edgar Raymond ("Ray") Shepard attended Oregon Agricultural College for 4 academic years (1897/98 through 1900/01) and received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1901. He attended the University of Oregon for one year (1901/02) and earned an M.S. degree from Harvard University in about 1906. He worked in Columbus, Georgia for several years and then returned to Oregon Agricultural College as an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering from 1909 until 1914, when he began working for the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C.