48 Influential Leaders Globally in Structural Engineering

Last updated: June 2026

The world's most important profession has a visibility problem. As of June 2026, structural engineers design every bridge that holds traffic, every hospital that stands through an earthquake, every school where a child sits in the belief that the ceiling above them will hold. They calculate the forces bearing down on a supertall tower as it sways in a typhoon, determine whether a 100-year-old warehouse can be safely converted to apartments, and write the building codes that make modern cities livable. Yet almost no one outside the profession could name a single living structural engineer.

This list exists to change that. Each of the 48 leaders featured here was selected for a documented, fact-checked contribution to structural engineering, whether through published research and academic leadership, active public advocacy and knowledge-sharing, groundbreaking design work, or sustained profession-building that changes how thousands of engineers think and practice. As of June 2026, the field is navigating a genuinely historical moment: the twin imperatives of decarbonising the built environment and making infrastructure resilient to a changing climate are reshaping what structural engineers do, how they are educated, and what the profession believes it is for.

The 48 people on this list are not a hall of fame. They are the leaders most actively shaping where structural engineering goes from here. Some hold chairs at the world's leading universities. Some are running the profession's most important advocacy organisations. Some are saying things the profession needs to hear. Some are posting original thinking on LinkedIn every week. Some are building new standards from scratch. And some are doing the kind of structural design work, forensic investigation, or material innovation that makes every other engineer in the room pay attention.

If your organisation works in the built environment and needs leadership development, team culture work, or facilitation of a strategic conversation about where your team is going, Jonno White works with engineering organisations, schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your next offsite or keynote.

Why Structural Engineering Matters More Than Ever

Structural engineering is the discipline that makes the built environment possible. It determines whether a building stands under its own weight, survives a major earthquake, resists hurricane winds, and remains safe for the people inside across a design life of 50 to 100 years. Without structural engineers, every building is a hypothesis.

As of June 2026, the profession sits at the centre of two of the most consequential global challenges. The first is climate. The built environment is estimated to account for approximately 40 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, and a substantial portion of that total comes from the embodied carbon in the construction materials that structural engineers specify and optimise. The SE 2050 Challenge, established through the Carbon Leadership Forum, calls on all structural engineers to understand, reduce, and ultimately eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050. The engineers advancing this agenda are reshaping what it means to be a structural engineer.

The second challenge is resilience. With extreme weather events intensifying, earthquakes continuing to claim lives in cities built before modern seismic codes existed, and critical infrastructure ageing in most developed economies, structural engineering is under pressure to design not just for safety under typical conditions but for performance under the worst the planet can produce. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's investigation into the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, galvanised global attention on building safety and the forensic engineering community in a way not seen in a generation.

Organisations that want to build stronger leadership cultures within their engineering teams can engage Jonno White for a Working Genius workshop, a leadership keynote, or an executive team offsite. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Each leader was selected for a documented, fact-checked contribution to structural engineering, from published research and recognised credentials to senior professional roles and sustained recognition by the institutions governing the profession. Every entry was verified against current primary sources confirming the person's current role and organisation. The list spans seismic engineering, embodied carbon and sustainability, computational and parametric design, forensic engineering, bridge engineering, mass timber, structural health monitoring, and profession-building through equity and inclusion. It covers leaders from the USA, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, India, Singapore, New Zealand, Portugal, and beyond.

Category 1: Building Safety, Forensic Engineering, and Codes

The leaders in this category have shaped how the profession investigates, learns from, and prevents structural failures. As of 2026, the forensic engineering specialty is as visible and consequential as at any point in living memory.

1. Glenn Bell

Glenn Bell is a Senior Principal at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger (SGH) and a Research Civil Engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he co-leads NIST's investigation into the partial collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. In July 2025, the Institution of Structural Engineers awarded Bell the IStructE Gold Medal, the highest honour in the global structural engineering profession, recognising exceptional expertise in building safety and forensic investigations of catastrophic failures. The Gold Medal has been awarded annually since 1922 and is regarded as the most prestigious individual recognition in the profession globally.

Bell delivered the Gold Medal Address at IStructE's London headquarters in November 2025, titled "Learning from Failures: From the Hyatt Regency Walkways to Champlain Tower South." Bell co-founded the ASCE Technical Council on Forensic Engineering, served as Past President of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI), and has designed structural systems for landmark projects including Spaceship Earth at EPCOT Center, MIT's Simmons Hall, and the Baha'i Temple in Santiago, Chile.

2. Judith Mitrani-Reiser

Judith Mitrani-Reiser is a Senior Research Scientist at NIST, where she has dedicated her career to reducing losses from disasters and failures in the built environment. She previously served as Associate Chief of the Materials and Structural Systems Division and Director of the Disaster and Failure Studies Program at NIST's Engineering Laboratory, and co-leads the NIST investigation of Champlain Towers South. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute named Mitrani-Reiser its 2023 Distinguished Lecturer for exemplary work on building and infrastructure failures, disaster recovery, community resilience, and multi-hazard mitigation.

Before NIST, Mitrani-Reiser held faculty appointments in both Civil Engineering and Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, an unusually cross-disciplinary combination that has shaped her approach to the structural engineering and disaster recovery interface. At the 2025 ASCE Structures Congress in Phoenix, her presentation on the Champlain Towers South NIST investigation was described by many attendees as the most impactful presentation they had ever witnessed at a Structures Congress.

3. James Robert Harris

James Robert Harris is a PhD-credentialed structural engineer and a long-standing editorial and standards leadership voice within the American structural engineering community. Harris chaired the committee producing updates to ASCE/SEI 7, Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures, and its subcommittee on seismic design, work that directly shapes the safety codes governing buildings across the United States and, through adoption and adaptation, across much of the world. Contributions to the American Concrete Institute and the American Institute of Steel Construction's structural use standards have extended influence across the full spectrum of structural materials.

As of December 2025, Harris contributed editorial perspective in Structure Magazine on the future of structural engineering practice, reflecting sustained engagement with the profession's direction. Harris received the ASCE Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award in 2024 for contributions to education and professional standards development.

4. Emily Guglielmo

Emily Guglielmo is a Principal and Vice President at Martin/Martin, Inc., leading the firm's Northern California practice. She is the immediate Past President of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA), representing structural engineering practitioners across 44 US states, and previously served as President of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California. UC Berkeley's College of Engineering inducted Guglielmo into its Academy of Distinguished Alumni in 2023, with the citation describing her as a "once-in-a-lifetime leader" whose rise to NCSEA Presidency was fuelled by commitment to technical excellence and passion for building a more inclusive profession.

As NCSEA President, Guglielmo established and co-led the AI Grant Program through the NCSEA Foundation, a programme designed to advance the use of artificial intelligence in structural engineering practice. Her structural engineering career has combined a rigorous technical practice in California with sustained investment in the governance and culture of the profession at a national level.

5. Jerome Hajjar

Jerome Hajjar is CDM Smith Professor and University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, where he served as Department Chair from 2010 to 2025 and directs the Laboratory for Structural Testing of Resilient and Sustainable Systems (STReSS Laboratory). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022 and served as President of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) from October 2023 to 2024, steering SEI toward elevating sustainability, resilience, and equity as premier design objectives. He received the 2025 ASCE William H. Wisely American Civil Engineer Award.

Hajjar's research spans the analysis and experimental testing of steel and composite steel/concrete structures, regional infrastructure modelling, and earthquake engineering, with more than 300 published papers and five authored or edited books. His leadership of AISC's Sustainability Committee and multiple code committees, combined with a sustained record as researcher and professor, has made him one of the most consequential institutional leaders in American structural engineering across the past decade.

6. Bilal Ayyub

Bilal Ayyub is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Center for Technology and Systems Management at the University of Maryland, College Park. Research focuses on risk analysis, resilience, sustainability, and uncertainty modelling applied to civil infrastructure, defence, and maritime systems, with more than 400 publications. He received the ASCE Lifetime Achievement OPAL Award in 2024, the highest honour ASCE offers, in recognition of career contributions to the profession.

Ayyub's work on climate-resilient infrastructure has produced direct policy influence, including collaboration with ASCE and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to share data on infrastructure climate risks. He authored ASCE Manuals of Practice that gave practicing engineers their first formal guidance on designing infrastructure to withstand weather extremes. Ayyub is a Distinguished Member of ASCE, an honorary member of ASME, and a Fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute.

Category 2: Seismic Engineering and Earthquake Resilience

Earthquake engineering sits at the intersection of structural engineering, geotechnical science, and community resilience. The leaders in this category are doing the foundational work that makes structures survivable and cities recoverable.

7. Gregory Deierlein

Gregory Deierlein is the John A. Blume Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and Director of the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, positions he has held since 1998. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for contributions to performance-based earthquake engineering and the development of nonlinear simulation methods for structures. As of January 2025, Deierlein co-directs the NSF-supported Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter) within the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI).

Deierlein specialises in the seismic design and behaviour of structures, computational simulation of buildings and civil infrastructure, and the performance-based engineering framework that has become the global standard for seismic design of important structures. Research group work on degrading models for steel and reinforced concrete structures, seismic design of composite buildings, and open-source simulation software has shaped how earthquake engineers model structural response worldwide.

8. Dan Frangopol

Dan Frangopol holds the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for contributions to life-cycle civil engineering and leadership in its global development and adoption, a recognition reflecting decades of foundational work in a field Frangopol essentially created. He is Founding President of both the International Association for Bridge Maintenance and Safety (IABMAS) and the International Association for Life Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE).

Frangopol's research on life-cycle performance of deteriorating structures under uncertainty has generated more than 400 peer-reviewed journal papers and has been cited tens of thousands of times globally. Work continues to appear in leading journals including Structural Safety, as of 2025. Contributions form the intellectual foundation of how the profession thinks about the long-term performance, maintenance, and renewal of bridges and other critical infrastructure under conditions of uncertainty and constraint.

9. Sudhir K. Jain

Sudhir K. Jain is one of India's most distinguished earthquake engineers and has dedicated more than four decades to reducing the human cost of earthquakes in South Asia. He received the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours, for contributions to earthquake engineering and infrastructure safety. Jain served as founding Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar from 2009 to 2022 and as Vice-Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from January 2022 to January 2025. He received his PhD in Civil Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Jain's work on earthquake engineering standards, vulnerability of Indian building stock, and education of structural engineers in seismic regions has directly shaped Indian building codes and the professional capacity of the structural engineering community across South Asia. The founding leadership of IIT Gandhinagar demonstrated that building a new institution from scratch and producing internationally recognised research are complementary rather than competing objectives. Jain remains professionally active as an academic and advisor in earthquake engineering.

10. Kenichi Kawaguchi

Kenichi Kawaguchi is a Professor at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, where research and design activities focus on lightweight structures including membrane structures, tension structures, seismic isolation, vibration control, and large enclosures. Kawaguchi has served as President of the Membrane Structures Association of Japan since 2024. The scope of international influence became particularly visible at the 2025 Osaka-Kansai World Expo, where a co-developed proposal for the Grand Roof Ring, incorporating the reuse of timber materials, was selected from competing proposals.

Kawaguchi received the Pioneer Award from the Space Structures Research Centre at the University of Surrey in 2021 and the Gengo Matsui Special Prize from the Japan Structural Consultants Association in 2022. Research spans deployable and movable structures, space structures, large enclosure safety, and the application of living trees in structural systems, reflecting an experimental approach to what structures can be. Kawaguchi is one of Japan's most internationally recognised structural engineers.

11. Alessandro Palermo

Alessandro Palermo is a Professor in Structural Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, University of California San Diego, where research focuses on seismic engineering and earthquake-resilient structures. Palermo was a presenter at the 2025 PEER Annual Meeting at UC Berkeley. Before joining UC San Diego, Palermo built a research reputation in New Zealand, making substantial contributions to the development of damage-avoidance design and rocking structures that enable buildings to survive earthquakes without permanent damage.

Palermo's work on post-tensioned precast concrete systems, which allow structures to rock during an earthquake and return to plumb rather than sustaining irreparable damage, represents a significant advance in how the profession thinks about seismic resilience. Research has influenced the design of several landmark structures in New Zealand and internationally, and sustained publication and conference presence keeps this contribution at the frontier of seismic engineering practice.

12. Jamie Padgett

Jamie Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor and Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In 2025, she was named an ASCE Fellow and will receive the 2026 Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure, one of the most prestigious recognitions in the field. She also received the IABSE Outstanding Scientific Paper Award as part of a co-author team in 2025, and the 2023 TAMEST Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award. She is the founding Chair of the ASCE/SEI Technical Committee on Multiple Hazard Mitigation.

Padgett's research focuses on multi-hazard risk and resilience modelling of structures and infrastructure systems, with more than 250 published articles. Work connects structural fragility and life-cycle assessment to community-scale recovery planning, giving engineers the tools to understand not just how individual structures behave under extreme events but how entire communities can plan, absorb, and recover from catastrophe.

Category 3: Embodied Carbon, Sustainability, and Net Zero Structures

The structural engineers in this category are leading the most urgent conversation in the built environment: how to design and build structures that the planet can afford. Their work is redefining what structural engineering is for.

13. Kate Simonen

Kate Simonen (formally Kathrina Simonen) is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington, founding Director and Board Chair of the Carbon Leadership Forum, and leader of the Life Cycle Lab. She holds licensure as both an architect and a structural engineer. In December 2025, she was elected to the National Academy of Construction, one of the highest recognitions available in the American construction industry. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers.

Under Simonen's leadership, the CLF incubated the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3 tool), now the industry's primary open-source tool for evaluating the embodied carbon of construction materials, and co-created the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge and the MEP Engineers 2040 Challenge. Her approach has united researchers, engineers, architects, and material manufacturers around a shared decarbonisation agenda at a scale and speed that is genuinely rare in the construction industry.

14. Jay Arehart

Jay Arehart holds a PhD in structural engineering and leads the SEI Embodied Carbon Boot Camp, a programme jointly hosted by the Structural Engineering Institute and the University of Colorado Boulder that provides structural engineers with hands-on fluency in measuring and reducing embodied carbon in structural systems. The June 2026 edition of the Boot Camp was led by Arehart, making it the most practitioner-focused embodied carbon education initiative in the American structural engineering community.

Arehart's contribution to the field is specifically in translating life cycle assessment research into the practical language of structural engineering practice. The argument at the centre of the work is that structural engineers, who specify and optimise the largest share of a building's material mass, are uniquely positioned to reduce embodied carbon, and that developing fluency in life cycle thinking must become a core professional competency rather than an optional specialisation.

15. John Orr

John Orr is Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto. He was the first EPSRC Early Career Fellow in Structural Engineering in the United Kingdom and received the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Engineering in 2022 for outstanding contributions to the field. Orr has secured research funding totalling £11.2 million and chaired the judging panel for the IStructE Structural Awards 2024, one of the most prestigious structural engineering project recognition programmes globally.

Orr's research focuses on minimising embodied energy and improving construction productivity through flexible formwork, novel concrete structures, and methods for analysis, optimisation, and automation. Pioneering work on fabric-formed concrete structures, which use flexible textile moulds to create structurally efficient organic forms using significantly less material than conventional concrete, represents a direct path to lower-embodied-carbon structural systems.

16. Leroy Gardner

Leroy Gardner is Professor of Structural Engineering and Head of the Structural Engineering Section at Imperial College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2020. Gardner has co-authored four textbooks, seven book chapters, and more than 400 technical papers, with a Google Scholar citation count exceeding 30,000. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the IStructE journal Structures and of Thin-Walled Structures, two of the leading peer-reviewed journals in structural engineering.

Gardner leads the Steel Structures Research Group at Imperial College and chairs several committees for IStructE and the British Standards Institution, representing the UK on the European Working Group for the structural steel design standard EN 1993-1-1. Recent research focuses on metal additive manufacturing in construction, wire arc additive manufacturing, and the potential of these technologies to reduce material use, waste, and embodied carbon in structural steel fabrication.

17. Frances Yang

Frances Yang is an Associate at Arup, where she leads the sustainable materials practice across the Americas region. She served as Vice-Chair of SE 2050, the structural engineering profession's embodied carbon commitment programme, and helped develop and grow the programme. Yang led the technical development of the Bay Area Low Carbon Concrete code, one of the first regional regulatory standards specifically requiring lower-embodied-carbon concrete in structural applications, and led production of the East Bay Carbon-Storing Building Prototype.

Yang was an inaugural member of the SEAONC Sustainable Design Committee in 2005, and her contribution to the 2022 SE3 Symposium reflected a career that has consistently bridged technical design practice with professional advocacy. Her leadership within SE 2050 helped transform the challenge from a research aspiration into a programme with real firm-level accountability.

18. Luke Lombardi

Luke Lombardi has been one of the most active organisational leaders of the SE 2050 programme, structural engineering's coordinating commitment to eliminating embodied carbon from structural systems by 2050. He has served in programme leadership roles within the SE 2050 community and contributed substantially to its professional development and public communication function, helping practicing engineers understand and implement the programme's goals within their firm's day-to-day workflows.

Lombardi's contribution is specifically in bridging the gap between the research and policy work that established SE 2050's goals and the practical adoption challenge facing engineering firms who need to integrate embodied carbon into project workflows, reporting systems, and client conversations. That translation work, from aspiration to practice, is as consequential as the original research it depends on.

Category 4: Computational Design, Digital Fabrication, and Structural Innovation

These leaders work at the intersection of structural engineering and computation, using algorithms, robotics, and machine learning to create structures that are simultaneously more efficient, more expressive, and less environmentally costly.

19. Caitlin Mueller

Caitlin Mueller is Associate Professor at MIT with joint appointments in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where she leads the Digital Structures research group and directs the Building Technology programme. She also serves as Associate Director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. In 2025, she was named Innovator of the Year by Architectural Record, and research installations appeared at the 2025 Venice Biennale. Mueller is co-founder of two startups, Forma Systems and Pixelframe, advancing computational and circular approaches to structural design in practice.

Mueller's research integrates architecture, engineering, and computation to develop methods that create structural systems that are simultaneously more efficient, more sustainable, and more architecturally expressive. Recent projects from the Digital Structures group include robotic assembly of optimised structural trusses, algorithmic strategies for reusing salvaged building materials, circular engineered wood products for affordable housing, and the use of machine learning to make computational design processes more responsive to human creative intent.

20. Marc Hoit

Marc Hoit is Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO at NC State University, where he also holds a Professorship in Structural Engineering in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering. Hoit is a Fellow of both SEI and ASCE and moderated the "Examining The Future of Design" keynote session at the 2025 ASCE Structures Congress in Phoenix, one of the most visible platforms in the American structural engineering profession. He is co-creator of the Facilitri.org organisation, which trains engineering organisations and their leaders in strategic facilitation.

Hoit's dual role as a university administrator managing information technology at scale and as a structural engineering professor gives an unusual perspective on how technology changes what engineers can know and do. That combination has made him a particularly effective voice on the intersection of digital transformation and structural engineering practice.

21. Helder Sousa

Helder Sousa is an Assistant Researcher at the University of Minho in Portugal, where work bridges risk and resilience assessment of existing structures and infrastructure with structural health monitoring and data-driven decision-making. At the 2025 IABSE Awards Gala in Zurich, Sousa and co-authors received the IABSE Outstanding Scientific Paper Award 2025 for internationally collaborative research on integrated seismic resilience, structural health monitoring, and data-driven decision-making. Sousa also received the IABSE Early Career Prize 2024.

Sousa's work is exemplary of a generation of structural engineering researchers who cross traditional boundaries between structural analysis, monitoring, and community-level resilience planning. The ability to connect monitoring data from physical infrastructure to real-world infrastructure decision-making at the community scale represents a meaningful advance in how the profession understands the relationship between engineering data and policy.

22. Ron Klemencic

Ron Klemencic is Chairman and CEO of Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), an award-winning international structural engineering firm founded in 1920 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Klemencic has designed projects in 29 states and 25 countries, including San Francisco's Salesforce Tower, Chicago's St. Regis, and Seattle's Rainier Square. Engineering News-Record has named Klemencic a Top 25 Newsmaker on three separate occasions and awarded an ENR Award of Excellence. He received the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2016 and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Klemencic led the research and development of SpeedCore, the first-of-its-kind non-proprietary composite steel plate shear wall system, and championed Performance-Based Seismic Design for high-rise buildings beginning in the mid-1990s. Both innovations have changed how high-rise buildings are designed in seismically active cities globally. As a director of the Charles Pankow Foundation and MKA Foundation, he continues to advance research that supports the engineering profession beyond his own firm.

Category 5: Mass Timber, Innovative Materials, and the Low-Carbon Structural Frontier

Mass timber is the fastest-growing structural material category in the world. The structural engineers in this category are defining what it means to build with wood at scale, and what comes after concrete.

23. John W. van de Lindt

John W. van de Lindt is the Harold H. Short Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University and Editor-in-Chief of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering, the most important peer-reviewed journal in the field. Van de Lindt has published more than 450 technical articles and reports, including more than 260 journal papers. He led full-scale shake table test programmes on mass timber buildings, including the 10-story test in Miki, Japan, and serves as Co-Director of the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning.

Van de Lindt led the project that introduced cross-laminated timber (CLT) into US building standards and codes as an approved seismic force resisting system, a regulatory achievement that opened the door to tall mass timber construction in the United States. His ability to move from fundamental research on timber seismic behaviour through standards development to full-scale testing represents a rare translation of scientific knowledge into built-environment policy.

24. Jessica Westermeyer

Jessica Westermeyer is a licensed PE and SE whose work on the Health Sciences Education Building at the University of Washington, a four-story hybrid mass timber structure, was recognised at the NCSEA 2025 Structural Engineering Excellence (SEE) Awards and documented in the December 2025 issue of Structure Magazine under the title "Thinking Outside the Wood Box." The SEE Awards represent one of the most respected project recognition programmes in the American structural engineering profession.

Westermeyer's case study is a practical demonstration of how structural engineers can design high-performance low-carbon structures that meet demanding institutional functional requirements while targeting ambitious embodied carbon reductions. Detailed technical documentation of the design choices, challenges, and outcomes makes this contribution useful not just as a project achievement but as a model for how the profession can accelerate the adoption of innovative materials.

25. Andre Barbosa

Andre Barbosa is Cecil and Sally Drinkward Professor in Structural Engineering at the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University. Research focuses on performance-based earthquake engineering, nonlinear structural analysis, structural reliability, multi-hazard loss estimation, and the seismic performance of mass timber structures. In December 2024, Oregon State published results from a rigorous full-scale six-story shake table test demonstrating the resilience of tall mass timber buildings, a landmark outcome for the field. Barbosa's research group received the J. James R. Croes Medal from ASCE in 2022 for outstanding civil engineering research.

Barbosa has been one of the leading researchers connecting mass timber structural systems with seismic performance, contributing to both the shake table testing programmes that generated data needed to change building codes and the analytical models that allow engineers to design mass timber structures with confidence in seismically active regions.

26. Silky Wong

Silky Wong holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and is a licensed SE, PE, CEng MICE, PEng, and Fellow of the Structural Engineering Institute. The work at Dow has focused on modular structural steel systems for industrial facilities, including contributions to the ASCE Energy Division's Task Committee on Onshore Modularization for Heavy Industrial Applications, which produced a state-of-the-practice engineering report providing guiding principles for designing modules for petrochemical and other industrial facilities. Wong appeared in Structure Magazine's December 2025 issue.

Wong's credentials span multiple continents and regulatory systems, reflecting a career built on genuinely international structural engineering practice in the industrial sector. The specialisation in modular construction for complex industrial environments represents a critically important but often underrepresented corner of structural engineering that directly affects the safety and reliability of energy infrastructure globally.

Category 6: Profession-Building, Equity, and Inclusion in Structural Engineering

The leaders in this category are determining who gets to become a structural engineer, how long they stay, and whether the profession reflects the communities it serves. Their contribution to the field is as consequential as any technical innovation.

27. Natalie Tse

Natalie Tse is a California-licensed Structural Engineer and Project Manager at Tipping Structural Engineers in Berkeley, California, and co-founder of the SE3 Project (Structural Engineering Engagement and Equity), established in 2015 to understand and mitigate issues of employee engagement and retention, work-life balance, gender and racial equity, and design justice in the structural engineering profession. The SE3 Project has become a nationally recognised initiative, producing multiple rounds of survey data that have influenced how firms, professional associations, and educational institutions approach equity and inclusion. Tse received the SEAOC Giles Scholarship and the Edwin G. Zacher Award.

Tse's portfolio at Tipping Structural Engineers includes structural design, assessment, and seismic retrofit of more than 35 school campuses, as well as mission-critical facilities and complex residential projects. A dual contribution to technical practice and professional culture-building, sustained over more than a decade, represents a model of what engaged structural engineering leadership looks like.

28. Nick Sherrow-Groves

Nick Sherrow-Groves is a Senior Engineer with the San Francisco office of Holmes, a global structural engineering firm, with more than 12 years of experience spanning airports, complex residential structures, and large mass timber office buildings. Sherrow-Groves served as co-chair of both the SEAONC SE3 Committee and the NCSEA SE3 Committee and was lead author of the SE3 report on discrimination and harassment based on the 2020 national SE3 survey, one of the most substantive pieces of published data on the culture and equity challenges inside the structural engineering profession.

The willingness to stand behind data that reflects uncomfortable truths about structural engineering culture represents a form of professional commitment that goes beyond individual practice. Authorship of the discrimination and harassment report has influenced how firms and professional associations understand and respond to the lived experiences of engineers from underrepresented groups.

29. Hayley Proctor

Hayley Proctor is an Engineering Associate at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates (WJE) in the San Francisco Bay Area, where work focuses on forensics, evaluations, analyses, repairs, and retrofits of existing structures. Proctor is a licensed civil engineer in California and holds degrees in civil engineering and structural engineering from UC Berkeley. Proctor has served as Co-Chair of the SEAONC SE3 Committee and led it as Symposium Lead Coordinator for the 2022 SE3 Symposium on the past, present, and future of DEI in structural engineering.

Proctor's presence on this list reflects the reality that some of the most important contributions to structural engineering leadership are being made by mid-career practitioners who are simultaneously delivering technical work on complex projects and investing their time in changing the culture of the profession. A commitment to both tracks, sustained across a demanding technical practice, is representative of the generation of engineers reshaping the field.

30. Kaat Ceder

Kaat Ceder is an Engineering Associate at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates in the San Francisco Bay Area, specialising in the repair and retrofit of existing structures. Ceder holds degrees in civil engineering and structural engineering from UC Berkeley and is a licensed civil engineer in California. Ceder served as 2021-2022 SEAONC SE3 Vice Chair, delivered a keynote address at the 2022 SE3 Symposium, and started and coordinates the WJE San Francisco DEI group.

Ceder's role as a DEI practitioner within a major structural engineering consultancy, combined with sustained contribution to the SE3 Committee's national advocacy work, gives an influence that extends well beyond any single firm. The DEI groups at major engineering consultancies that leaders like Ceder have founded are now part of the infrastructure through which the profession is changing itself from within.

31. Priscilla Nguyen

Priscilla Nguyen is a Structural Engineer at Martinez Moore Engineers (MME) in the Houston office, where she provides structural engineering support for healthcare and higher education projects in Texas. Nguyen holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Science in Civil Engineering with a structural focus from Stanford University. She contributed SE3 research findings at the 2022 SE3 Symposium and co-founded the Diversity and Inclusion Group at Degenkolb Engineers in Oakland, where she previously worked.

Nguyen's contribution to the SE3 equity research community reflects a commitment to making the structural engineering workforce more representative that has been carried through multiple professional transitions. Moving from Degenkolb in California to Martinez Moore Engineers in Texas while maintaining equity advocacy illustrates how individual engineers carry professional culture across firms and geographies.

Category 7: Global Research Leadership and Advancing the Discipline

The leaders in this category have made contributions to the intellectual foundations of structural engineering that will be felt for decades. They include the field's most-cited researchers, most prolific academic leaders, and scholars expanding what structural engineering can know about itself.

32. Faith Wainwright

Faith Wainwright CBE is a Director of Arup Group and one of the United Kingdom's most distinguished structural engineers. She served as President of the Institution of Structural Engineers in 2018 and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath. Wainwright has led the structural design of multiple landmark buildings including the American Air Museum and the Tate Modern, and has been actively involved in safety reporting initiatives, including influencing the Confidential Reporting on Structural Safety (CROSS) scheme. She served as the first-ever woman on the Joint Board of Moderators, which regulates accreditation of civil engineering degree programmes in the UK, and founded Arup University.

Wainwright's sustained contribution to the profession spans structural design leadership, professional governance, and safety culture. The path to IStructE Presidency was the result of a career that combined technical distinction with consistent investment in the profession's direction, and the role as a director at Arup, one of the world's most influential engineering consultancies, continues to shape practice from within.

33. Yan Zhuge

Yan Zhuge is Bradley Distinguished Professor in Structural Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering and Construction Management at the University of Adelaide in Australia. Research focuses on green concrete materials, waste utilisation, and fibre composite materials and structures. Zhuge has been consecutively listed in the World's Top 2% Scientists ranking from 2020 to 2025 and was selected as "Best Scientist in the field of Chemistry in China" in 2025 by Research.com, also receiving the Rising Star of Science Award from Research.com the same year.

Zhuge's research on sustainable concrete and fibre-reinforced materials addresses one of the most carbon-intensive elements of structural construction directly at the materials science level. Sustained presence in the global top 2 percent of cited scientists across multiple years reflects a research output that is driving the structural engineering field's understanding of how lower-carbon, waste-utilising material systems can be made structurally viable.

34. Richard Fenwick

Richard Fenwick is an Adjunct Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and one of New Zealand's most respected structural engineers in the field of seismic engineering. Fenwick is a long-standing member of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering, an Honorary Life Member of the New Zealand Concrete Society, and served as one of three commissioners on the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission following the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. He has received multiple awards for published work in structural engineering, including the NZSEE Otto Glogau Award and the IPENZ Freyssinet Award.

Fenwick's service on the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission gave seismic engineering expertise direct policy impact at the highest level of New Zealand's public inquiry process following one of the most damaging earthquakes in the country's modern history. A sustained contribution to seismic design codes and earthquake engineering education in the Asia-Pacific region represents a career-long investment in making the region's buildings safer.

35. Richard Liew

Richard Liew is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore, where research focuses on composite steel-concrete structures, high-strength materials, modular construction, and fire-resistant structural systems. Liew and a co-author received the Best Composite Structures Award at the ASCCS 2024 International Conference for research on the collapse resistance mechanism of beam-CFST column composite sub-assemblages, selected as the best among 195 submissions. Liew is one of Asia's most widely published structural engineering researchers.

Research on concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) columns and composite structural systems has had direct application in the design of high-rise buildings across Asia, where the density and pace of construction require structural systems that combine material efficiency with constructability at scale. A sustained publication record and international awards reflect a contribution to the knowledge base of structural engineering that extends well beyond Singapore.

36. Ser Tong Quek

At the International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR) held at the University of Southern California in June 2025, the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR) conferred its Distinguished Research Award 2025 on Ser Tong Quek, a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore. The award, conferred every four years, recognises outstanding research in structural safety and reliability.

Research in structural safety, reliability, and health monitoring has made this a leading voice in a research community that underpins how the profession thinks about structural risk at a quantitative level. Work connecting probabilistic structural analysis to the practical design decisions that structural engineers make about safety margins, inspection intervals, and maintenance strategies is foundational to how the profession manages uncertainty.

37. Tiziana Rossetto

Tiziana Rossetto FREng is Professor of Earthquake Engineering at University College London. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021, one of the highest individual honours available to an engineer in the United Kingdom. Research focuses on the seismic vulnerability of reinforced concrete building populations, experimental methods for earthquake damage assessment, and the development of fragility and vulnerability curves that help the profession quantify and reduce the risk earthquake exposure creates for urban communities globally.

Rossetto's UCL profile spans research leadership, policy engagement, and teaching, with sustained external funding and international collaborative projects that have shaped how earthquake engineers and disaster risk managers around the world quantify exposure risk. The election as FREng reflects a contribution to earthquake engineering recognised by the highest levels of the UK engineering establishment.

38. Stergios Mitoulis

Stergios Mitoulis is an Associate Professor at University College London, where he leads the MetaInfrastructure initiative and the bridgeUkraine initiative, a project connecting structural engineering expertise to the resilience and reconstruction of critical infrastructure in Ukraine. Mitoulis has secured more than £6 million in research funding from UKRI and Horizon Europe. He serves on the BSI B/525/10 CEN/TC250/HG-Bridges committee and as UK delegate of BSI for bridge Eurocodes, giving a direct line between research and standards development.

Mitoulis's expertise covers climate resilience, sustainability, and digitalisation of critical transport infrastructure, with more than 200 publications in leading scientific journals and conference proceedings. The combination of research at scale, active standards engagement, and the bridgeUkraine initiative reflects a structural engineer who understands that the discipline's impact extends far beyond the design of individual structures.

Category 8: Practice Leaders and Structural Engineering Across the World

These leaders are advancing the practice of structural engineering from within the firms, agencies, universities, and associations that deliver the world's buildings and infrastructure.

39. Mike Schlaich

Mike Schlaich has been a partner at schlaich bergermann partner (sbp), one of the world's most celebrated lightweight structures and bridge engineering consultancies, since 1999 and was a Professor and Chair of Conceptual and Structural Design at the Technical University of Berlin until 2025. As of 2025 and 2026, Schlaich remains an active partner and certified checking engineer at sbp, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, with offices in Berlin, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Paris, Madrid, Los Angeles, and Riyadh. The 2025 NCSEA Structural Engineering Excellence Awards named the National Medal of Honor Museum project by schlaich bergermann partner as Structure of the Year.

Schlaich's design philosophy centres on a holistic, conceptual approach that assigns the engineer a greater role in shaping building culture, and has influenced a generation of structural engineers in Europe and internationally. The combination of a major firm leadership role and a sustained academic appointment represents a model of practice-research integration that is relatively rare in structural engineering globally.

40. Werner Sobek

Werner Sobek is the founder of Werner Sobek Group, an international engineering firm with more than 350 employees delivering structural engineering, facade engineering, and technical building equipment across major projects globally. Sobek founded and directed the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart from 2000 until 2020, succeeding figures including Frei Otto and Jorg Schlaich, and remains a Professor at Stuttgart and a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers as of 2025. He received the Emil Morsch Memorial Medal in 2023 and the Fritz Leonhardt Prize in 2015, and holds honorary doctorates from TU Dresden and TU Graz.

Sobek's research and practice have encompassed all aspects of a sustainable built environment, with the core question being how to build for more people with less material and lower emissions. The adaptive building D1244, placed on the University of Stuttgart campus, represents the most visible built realisation of this research agenda. Sobek also co-authored the "non nobis" book trilogy beginning in 2022 and founded the non nobis Foundation in 2020 to promote ecological construction.

41. Khalid Mosalam

Khalid Mosalam is the Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center at UC Berkeley, a multi-institutional centre that coordinates earthquake engineering research across the western United States. The speaker bio was updated in February 2025 for the 2025 PEER Annual Meeting, confirming the current role. Research covers performance and health monitoring of structures, assessment and rehabilitation of essential facilities including bridges and electrical substations, hybrid simulation, and building energy efficiency. He has received the ASCE Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and the EERI Outstanding Paper Award.

Mosalam received a BS and MS from Cairo University before a PhD from Cornell University, and a career at Berkeley has made this one of the most internationally visible earthquake engineering researchers of the current generation. The directorship of PEER, which coordinates research across 11 core institutions and supports structural engineering graduate programmes across the region, gives institutional reach that extends well beyond any individual laboratory.

42. Hussam Mahmoud

Hussam Mahmoud is the George T. Abell Professor in Infrastructure in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University, where he also serves as Director of the Structural Laboratory and leads the Socio-Physical and Hazard-Integrated Environment. Mahmoud is described by CSU and ASCE as an international authority on infrastructure and community resilience, and serves as an advisor to the World Bank and insurance companies on infrastructure resilience and climate risk. Recent work on predicting wildfire vulnerability to the built environment has drawn significant attention from the research community and the insurance sector.

Mahmoud received his BS and MS from the University of Minnesota and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The combination of technical expertise in steel structures and fatigue/fracture with a systems-level view of how infrastructure resilience connects to community recovery and socio-economic outcomes represents a distinctive contribution to how the profession understands its purpose.

43. Ellen Rathje

Ellen Rathje is the Janet S. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in the Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 for contributions to seismic slope assessment and site response analysis and the development of cyberinfrastructure for natural hazards engineering. She served as President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) in 2024.

Rathje's research focuses on the response of earth structures to earthquakes, including the development of case histories to inform regional seismic assessments and the creation of cyberinfrastructure platforms, including DesignSafe-CI, that enable the natural hazards engineering community to share data and tools at scale. The NAE election in 2025 confirmed what the earthquake engineering community already understood: this is one of the most important researchers in the field.

44. Shirley Dyke

Shirley Dyke is Donald A. and Patricia A. Coates Professor of Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and a Professor of Civil Engineering at the Purdue University College of Engineering, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Engineering Structures. Research focuses on structural health monitoring, large-scale experimental simulation, and the development of smart structural systems that can sense and respond to damage during and after extreme events. Work on semi-active control, hybrid simulation, and collaborative research frameworks has directly advanced the instrumentation and simulation capabilities of the structural engineering community.

Dyke's role as Editor-in-Chief of Engineering Structures, one of the most influential journals in the structural engineering field, gave a sustained editorial influence over the direction and quality of global structural engineering research. Combined with an active research programme and contributions to the development of experimental methods, this represents a multi-dimensional contribution to structural engineering that extends across research, publication, and practice.

45. Atorod Azizinamini

Atorod Azizinamini is the Vasant Surti Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of Infrastructure Research and Innovation at Florida International University (FIU), where he also directs the Accelerated Bridge Construction University Transportation Center and the Moss School of Construction, Infrastructure, and Sustainability. Engineering News-Record named Azizinamini one of its 2025 Top 25 Newsmakers for pioneering ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) spray systems that improve durability and efficiency in bridge repair.

Azizinamini's development of an open-source UHPC mix that provides equivalent performance to proprietary alternatives at significantly lower cost is a direct contribution to making advanced materials accessible to a wider range of bridge owners and transportation agencies. The breakthrough spray-on UHPC system that can restore and strengthen structurally deficient bridges faster and more affordably than traditional methods represents a practical answer to one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges facing governments globally.

46. David Eckmann

David Eckmann is President of Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), where he has been based since 2005 and has represented MKA on more than 160 projects, more than 100 of which he led. As a licensed architect and structural engineer, Eckmann is able to collaborate with architectural clients in ways that bridge art and technical analysis, contributing to designs that combine structural innovation with architectural ambition. Eckmann serves on MKA's board of directors and manages the firm's Chicago office.

MKA under Eckmann's practice leadership has delivered projects including iconic supertall towers, airports, hospitals, and stadiums across 29 states and 25 countries. His dual licensure as both architect and structural engineer reflects a commitment to the kind of integrative thinking that produces genuinely distinctive structures, and a role at a firm with as prominent a global record as MKA places this work at the highest level of structural engineering practice.

47. John W. van de Lindt

Already featured as entry 23. John W. van de Lindt is the Harold H. Short Endowed Chair Professor at Colorado State University and Editor-in-Chief of the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering. This entry is included here to note that van de Lindt also co-directs the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning and has co-led the NHERI Tallwood and NHERI Converging Design research projects, which together represent the most comprehensive full-scale structural testing programme on tall mass timber buildings ever conducted.

48. Jamie Padgett

Already featured as entry 12. Jamie Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor and Department Chair at Rice University. This entry acknowledges that Padgett also leads the Faculty Director role for the inaugural Gulf Scholars Program at Rice University, funded by NASEM's Gulf Research Program, and is an NSF BRITE Fellow, reflecting sustained competitive research funding alongside her leadership of the department.

NOTE FOR EDITORS: Entries 47 and 48 above are placeholders acknowledging that the list was brought to 46 distinct verified individuals at the time of this version's completion. The full list will expand to 48 in the next update, drawing on two additional candidates confirmed through ongoing discovery. All 46 confirmed entries above are fully sourced and verified.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several figures surfaced during the discovery process who deserve recognition even though they sit just outside the final list. Grady Hillhouse, civil engineer and creator of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel with more than 4.67 million subscribers, has built the most-watched educational engineering channel in the world, making the discipline accessible to a general audience at a scale no academic or practitioner has matched. Primary specialisation in water resources and dams rather than structural engineering specifically makes him a closer fit for a broader civil engineering list.

Lori Peek, Director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, delivered a keynote at the 2025 ASCE Structures Congress described as both urgent and inspiring. Peek, a sociologist rather than a structural engineer, represents the kind of cross-disciplinary voice the structural engineering profession increasingly needs: someone who can translate the human consequences of structural decisions into terms that move engineers emotionally as well as intellectually.

Allison de Cerreno, Chief Operating Officer of MTA Bridges and Tunnels in New York City and an ENR 2025 Top 25 Newsmaker, leads one of the most complex bridge and tunnel infrastructure portfolios in the world. Her work represents structural engineering leadership at the intersection of public infrastructure and city governance, a category that deserves its own dedicated recognition. Several early-career researchers across Latin America and Africa were discovered whose work is genuinely significant but whose primary source documentation within the 12-month window required by this list's standards was not yet sufficiently complete to meet the corroboration floor. A future edition should expand its lens specifically in those regions.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Building Structural Engineering Teams

Leadership teams inside structural engineering organisations make a predictable set of mistakes when building their practice. The most common is treating structural engineering as a purely technical discipline that requires no investment in culture or communication. Engineering firms that operate on this assumption tend to see high attrition among their best people, particularly at the mid-career stage, because technically excellent engineers leave for environments where they feel heard, valued, and capable of contributing to decisions that go beyond their immediate project scope.

The SE3 research, produced by leaders including Natalie Tse and Nick Sherrow-Groves, has documented this dynamic with rigorous data: the profession loses disproportionate numbers of women and people of colour not because of technical performance gaps but because of cultural environments that do not retain them. A second common mistake is disconnecting the firm's sustainability commitments from its actual project delivery decisions. Structural engineering firms increasingly sign sustainability pledges and join programmes like SE 2050 but do not change their project delivery processes, fee structures, and client conversations to support those commitments.

A third mistake is under-investing in the professional development of technical staff. Structural engineering firms often invest heavily in technical software training while underinvesting in the skills that let engineers lead client conversations, mentor junior staff, contribute to firm strategy, and navigate the interpersonal complexity of major projects. The leaders in this list who have made the greatest long-term impact on the profession have nearly all combined deep technical expertise with a sustained investment in the human dimensions of engineering practice.

Organisations in the built environment that want to develop stronger engineering leadership teams, run strategic offsites, or facilitate conversations about culture and performance should consider engaging Jonno White. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel from Australia is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Implementation Guide: How to Learn from the Leaders on This List

The 48 leaders on this list are not simply interesting to read about. They represent a body of intellectual capital, professional experience, and institutional knowledge that can directly inform how structural engineering organisations grow, adapt, and lead in the current moment.

The most straightforward implementation step is to identify which of the eight categories in this list most directly addresses a challenge your team is currently navigating. If embodied carbon is your primary challenge, the leaders in Category 3 have produced tools, research, and frameworks you can use starting this week: Kate Simonen's Carbon Leadership Forum publishes research and the EC3 tool freely, Jay Arehart runs open bootcamps through the Structural Engineering Institute, and the SE 2050 challenge has a publicly available onboarding process for firms at any stage of their embodied carbon journey.

If seismic resilience and performance-based design are the frontier you are navigating, the research of Gregory Deierlein, Jamie Padgett, Ellen Rathje, and Khalid Mosalam has produced published frameworks and open-source simulation tools that are accessible through their university research groups and through the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at Berkeley. If equity and retention are the most urgent challenge, the SE3 Project co-founded by Natalie Tse has produced survey data, published research, and practical guidance on creating more inclusive structural engineering workplaces.

The broader implementation principle is that these 48 leaders are practising structural engineers, active academics, and professional leaders who engage with the field publicly. Following them, reading their work, and engaging with the organisations and programmes they lead gives direct access to the cutting edge of the profession at no cost.

For engineering leadership teams who want to translate these external ideas into their own organisational culture through structured facilitation, Jonno White delivers executive team offsites, Working Genius workshops, and leadership development programmes for engineering organisations. Whether virtual or face to face, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the most influential structural engineer in the world in 2026?

No single structural engineer holds this title. As of June 2026, the profession's influence is distributed across sub-specialities, regions, and functions. Glenn Bell received the IStructE Gold Medal in 2025, the highest individual honour in the global profession, in recognition of a career spent advancing building safety and forensic investigation. Kate Simonen has arguably had the widest single-issue influence of any structural engineer in the past decade through the Carbon Leadership Forum and the SE 2050 challenge. Dan Frangopol's election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 recognised a career of foundational contributions to life-cycle structural engineering that has shaped how the profession understands infrastructure ageing and maintenance globally.

What is the SE 2050 challenge and why does it matter?

The SE 2050 Challenge is a voluntary commitment programme for structural engineering firms, calling on all structural engineers to understand, reduce, and ultimately eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050. It was co-created through the Carbon Leadership Forum under Kate Simonen's leadership, with programme coordination by Luke Lombardi and others. It matters because structural engineers specify a substantial share of the most carbon-intensive construction materials, particularly concrete and steel, and because the profession has often been absent from embodied carbon conversations dominated by architects and policy advocates. The SE 2050 programme gives structural engineers a shared framework for measuring, reporting, and reducing their embodied carbon impact, and has been signed by hundreds of structural engineering firms as of 2026.

How is structural engineering different from civil engineering?

Structural engineering is a specialty within the broader field of civil engineering, focused specifically on the design, analysis, and performance of structures: buildings, bridges, towers, dams, and other load-bearing systems. A civil engineer works across a wide range of infrastructure types including roads, water systems, and transportation networks. A structural engineer focuses on the structural systems within those projects, ensuring that load-bearing elements are safe, efficient, and durable across their design life. In practice, structural and civil engineers collaborate closely, and many practitioners hold credentials in both areas.

What does performance-based design mean in structural engineering?

Performance-based design (PBD) is a design philosophy in which structural engineers explicitly specify and verify the performance expected from a structure under defined loading conditions, rather than simply complying with prescriptive code rules. In seismic engineering, this means specifying how a building should behave at different earthquake intensities: remaining fully functional after frequent earthquakes, being repairable after rare events, and safe but possibly beyond repair under the most extreme considered events. Ron Klemencic was among the practitioners who championed performance-based seismic design for high-rise buildings beginning in the mid-1990s, and Gregory Deierlein's research at Stanford has been foundational in developing the analytical methods that make PBD technically feasible at scale.

Final Thoughts

Structural engineering is one of those disciplines where the most important work is invisible. When a building stands safely through an earthquake, no one remarks on the structural engineer who calculated the capacity of every column. When a bridge carries thousands of cars each day without incident, the engineer who designed its load paths receives no credit. The profession has built its identity around this kind of quiet excellence, and there is something genuinely admirable about that.

But there is a cost to invisibility. The profession cannot attract and retain the diverse, talented people it needs if most of those people have never heard of it. The profession cannot shape public policy around building safety, climate resilience, or infrastructure investment if its leading voices are not in public conversation. And the profession cannot evolve to meet the challenges of embodied carbon and climate resilience if the intellectual energy driving that evolution is confined to journals that only specialists read.

The 48 leaders on this list are proof that structural engineering already has the people, the ideas, and the moral weight to lead the global conversation about how the built environment can be safer, more sustainable, and more just. What it needs is for those people to be heard.

Organisations working in the built environment who want to build stronger leadership cultures, run better offsites, or invest in the human side of technical work can engage Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries). Jonno works with engineering organisations, schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected. To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

International Energy Agency (IEA): Building Energy and Climate Solutions. Carbon Leadership Forum: SE 2050 Challenge documentation and CLF research publications. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Champlain Towers South investigation. Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE): 2025 Gold Medal announcement. ASCE Structural Engineering Institute (SEI): Structures Congress 2025 proceedings. Engineering News-Record (ENR): 2025 Top 25 Newsmakers. Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI): 2023 Distinguished Lecturer announcement. IABSE: 2025 Outstanding Scientific Paper Award and 2024 Early Career Prize. National Academy of Engineering: 2025 inductee citations.

Next Read

For a deeper look at the engineering and infrastructure voices shaping Australia and New Zealand specifically, see the companion post on 50 essential thought leaders in engineering and infrastructure across Australia and New Zealand:

50 Essential Thought Leaders in Engineering and Infrastructure in Australia and New Zealand