Engineering Community Mourns Loss of Simulation Giant

Steve MacDonald, CEO & Co-Founder of CD-adapco, dies at 71.

CD-adapco announced today that their co-founder, president and CEO Peter “Steve” MacDonald passed away on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015.

I met Steve on a few occasions, though only for a few minutes each time. I could tell from those meetings, and his presentations, that he was passionate about his company and the people who made it successful. I know he will be missed.

For 35 years, Steve’s leadership propelled CD-adapco to become one of the largest privately held CFD companies in the world.

CD-adapco recalls that “Steve passionately pursued his vision of ‘no-compromise’ engineering simulation applied to real world products and processes. In fulfilling that vision, Steve’s primary objective was to achieve his customer’s goals and to push the capabilities of CD-adapco’s software products beyond the merely possible. Steve’s unfailing commitment to recruit the best and brightest engineers leaves CD-adapco with the talent necessary to maintain its strong worldwide support organization and its leading industry position.”

Company Director, Sharron L. MacDonald will be succeeding Steve as Interim President and CEO of CD-adapco. I have no doubt that with her leadership, the talented people at CD-adapco will continue Steve’s legacy.

Written by

Shawn Wasserman

For over 10 years, Shawn Wasserman has informed, inspired and engaged the engineering community through online content. As a senior writer at WTWH media, he produces branded content to help engineers streamline their operations via new tools, technologies and software. While a senior editor at Engineering.com, Shawn wrote stories about CAE, simulation, PLM, CAD, IoT, AI and more. During his time as the blog manager at Ansys, Shawn produced content featuring stories, tips, tricks and interesting use cases for CAE technologies. Shawn holds a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Guelph and an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.