50 Influential Thought Leaders in Civil Engineering

Introduction

Civil engineering is the oldest of the engineering disciplines and, in many respects, the most consequential. Every road you have ever driven on, every bridge you have crossed, every pipe that has delivered clean water to your home, every levee that held back a flood, every tunnel that moved a train beneath a mountain: these are the work of civil engineers. And yet the profession's most important thinkers are among the least visible public intellectuals in the world, even as their decisions shape the physical conditions of human existence more directly than almost anyone else.

There are over 368,000 civil engineers working in the United States alone, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The global infrastructure gap is estimated at more than 15 trillion US dollars, meaning the world needs to build or upgrade the equivalent of an entire additional planet's worth of roads, ports, water systems, and bridges over the next generation. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States infrastructure an overall grade of C in its 2025 Report Card, the best-ever grade but still a sobering assessment of how much work remains. The people thinking most clearly about how to close that gap, decarbonise what we build, and prevent aging infrastructure from failing catastrophically are not always the people making headlines.

This guide brings together 50 of the most credible, active, and genuinely valuable civil engineering thought leaders in 2026. They span structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, transportation, water resources, environmental engineering, digital infrastructure, climate resilience, and the frontier of AI in design. The list deliberately moves past historical figures who appear on every famous civil engineers article and focuses on living voices who are actively shaping how the field thinks, learns, and leads.

One of the most striking recent contributions to civil engineering thought came from Leidy Klotz at the University of Virginia, whose research found that the profession is deeply biased toward adding more rather than subtracting strategically. His book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less makes a case that applies across engineering, policy, and life, but lands with particular force in a field where the instinct to build is both professional habit and commercial incentive. The voices on this list are, collectively, asking harder questions: what we build, for whom, at what cost, and what the planet can actually absorb.

Civil engineering is not a technical problem. It is a leadership challenge. If your executive team makes decisions in a sector shaped by infrastructure, following the right thinkers in this space can change how you lead. Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally). He works with leadership teams across engineering, infrastructure, and government sectors to turn the ideas championed by the field's best thinkers into practical, aligned leadership action.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore how Jonno might support your team.

Why Civil Engineering Thought Leadership Matters

Civil engineering is in the middle of an identity crisis, and the best civil engineering thinkers know it. The profession built the modern world. It also, in many parts of the world, built highways that razed communities of colour, dams that displaced millions, and flood infrastructure that protected wealthy suburbs while exposing low-income communities to higher risk. Reckoning with that legacy while simultaneously designing infrastructure for the next century is not a technical challenge. It is a leadership, ethical, and communication challenge of the highest order.

The global infrastructure stock is aging faster than it is being renewed in most high-income countries. Bridges in the United States have an average age of 45 years. Water mains in major cities are routinely more than a century old. The United Kingdom faces a long-running maintenance deficit. In the developing world, the infrastructure gap is a defining constraint on human development, health, and economic participation. The engineering knowledge to address all of these problems exists. What is often missing is the political will, the public understanding, and the leadership capacity to deploy it.

The thought leaders on this list are building that understanding. They are writing books for general audiences, running podcasts that make infrastructure accessible, posting LinkedIn content that shifts how the profession thinks, and sitting in institutional roles where engineering knowledge directly influences policy.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss how Jonno White facilitates leadership workshops and executive sessions that help teams apply engineering-informed thinking to their most pressing decisions.

For more on the broader engineering leadership landscape, check out my blog post 50 Best Thought Leaders in Engineering (2026)

How This List Was Compiled

The 50 civil engineering thought leaders on this list were selected based on four criteria: genuine credentialled expertise in civil engineering or a directly adjacent field, active contribution to the public conversation through published works, podcasts, LinkedIn content, conference keynotes, or institutional leadership, geographic and disciplinary diversity across the full spectrum of civil engineering sub-disciplines, and a deliberate prioritisation of voices the reader may not have already encountered. The list spans six continents and ten sub-disciplines, from structural engineering and geotechnical practice to water resources, climate resilience, digital transformation, and construction innovation. It ranges from established institution presidents to early-career practitioners with rapidly growing platforms. Inclusion is based on the quality and currency of each person's contribution to the field, not on the size of their social media following or the prestige of their employer.

Category 1: Advocacy and Policy Voices

The civil engineers in this first group are translating engineering knowledge into public language, institutional advocacy, and policy change. Most technical professionals struggle to communicate urgency to non-technical audiences. These seven have made it a central part of their professional identity.

1. Maria Lehman

Maria Lehman is an executive advisor on US infrastructure and a past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, having served as ASCE's 2022-23 president while serving as US Infrastructure Market Leader at GHD, a global professional services company. Her ability to translate infrastructure urgency into political language shaped how the profession communicated the significance of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to Congress and the public. Lehman is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, inducted in the Class of 2025.

Her writing on equity in infrastructure, particularly the ways that infrastructure investment and disinvestment have historically tracked racial and economic geography in American cities, represents some of the most honest public discourse in the profession. Where many infrastructure advocates talk about the economics of infrastructure investment, Lehman talks about who gets protected and who gets left behind, a distinction that makes her a genuinely important voice in a field working through its past.

2. Marsha Anderson Bomar

Marsha Anderson Bomar is the 2025-26 president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a career civil engineer, transportation planner, strategic transportation advisor at GHD, and founder of her own firms over two decades, built deliberately around flexible, human-centred management after being told that having three children meant she was not serious about her career. She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in the Class of 2025, alongside her predecessor Maria Lehman.

Her 2026 article Empowering Women in Civil Engineering in Civil Engineering magazine is a direct account of what systemic change in a male-dominated profession requires in practice, not just in principle. Anderson Bomar holds a PhD from Clemson University and is a Fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Her ASCE presidency has raised the public profile of civil engineering at a moment when the profession urgently needs advocates who can speak clearly about what infrastructure means for how communities live.

3. Anusha Shah

Anusha Shah became president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2026, taking the helm of a body representing more than 95,000 civil engineers across 150 countries. Her theme for the presidency, sustainable, inclusive and resilient infrastructure, signals a deliberate effort to move the ICE's public position from technical standards-setting toward a broader conversation about what infrastructure is for and who it serves. Shah's work on inclusive design challenges the engineering profession to see the average user assumption embedded in most infrastructure design, and to ask whose needs are systematically excluded as a result.

Her public communication is accessible and direct. At her inaugural address, alongside broadcaster Steph McGovern, she spoke specifically about the importance of communicating with non-technical audiences, a skill she models in her own LinkedIn presence and conference appearances. Shah's platform as ICE President is one of the most significant in global civil engineering, and she is using it to broaden both the profession's public reach and its internal culture.

4. Peter O'Neil

Peter O'Neil served as executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers until late 2025 and was one of the most important institutional voices in civil engineering advocacy globally during his tenure. He hosted the ASCE Plot Points podcast, which became a significant platform for communicating infrastructure urgency to engineering professionals and general audiences. His leadership of ASCE during the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act shaped how the US engineering profession positioned itself in relation to one of the largest infrastructure investment programmes in the country's history.

O'Neil's podcast work gave him a more personal, communicative presence than a traditional executive director role might typically produce. His conversations with engineers, researchers, and policymakers consistently made the stakes of infrastructure decisions legible to audiences who might otherwise tune out. Under his leadership, ASCE published the 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, which saw the overall grade rise to C, the best-ever result, but flagged persistent challenges in roads, bridges, drinking water, and stormwater systems.

5. Rachel Skinner

Rachel Skinner is an Executive Director at WSP, where she leads on responsible business (ESG) and government relations, and a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She received a CBE in recognition of her services to infrastructure and served as the 156th President of the ICE in 2020-21, the youngest person and only the second woman to hold the role in the institution's 200-year history. Her theme of Shaping Zero placed climate action and net-zero infrastructure at the centre of the ICE's agenda during her presidency.

Skinner chairs the Infrastructure Carbon workstream of the Infrastructure Client Group and the ICE's Decarbonisation Advisory Board. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leeds and Exeter. Her advocacy for decarbonising infrastructure has moved from the fringes of engineering practice toward mainstream adoption in major UK infrastructure programmes, and her voice has been significant in making that shift happen.

6. Jake Bittle

Jake Bittle is a staff writer at Grist and author whose 2023 book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration brought the consequences of infrastructure failure and climate vulnerability into sharp, human focus for a general readership. While Bittle is not an engineer, he has become one of the most important external voices shaping how the public understands the civil engineering challenge of our time. His journalism, spanning climate migration, flood risk, and the failure of infrastructure to protect communities from a warming world, provides essential context for why the work of the people on this list matters.

ASCE confirmed Bittle as a keynote speaker for ASCE2027, the inaugural infrastructure and engineering experience, which signals how seriously the profession is taking the need to engage voices that can communicate engineering's consequences to general audiences. His reporting on how insurance markets, property values, and government disaster relief intersect with infrastructure decisions provides civil engineers with a richer picture of the environment in which their work is received and understood.

7. Patricia Galloway

Patricia Galloway made history as the first woman to serve as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2003, and her career since has continued to break ground in construction law, project management, and international engineering. The founder and CEO of Galloway and Co, she holds both a law degree and a civil engineering background, giving her a distinctive perspective on the contractual, regulatory, and leadership dimensions of large infrastructure projects. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on the boards of some of the world's largest engineering and construction organisations.

Galloway's work focuses on project management, dispute resolution, and the governance of complex infrastructure programmes, areas where her combined legal and engineering expertise makes her unusually effective. She remains active in engineering leadership forums and uses her platform to advocate for women in the profession and for rigorous, ethics-driven project management practice.

Category 2: Structural and Geotechnical Innovators

Structural and geotechnical engineering deal with the fundamental questions of how things stand up and what they stand on. The seven people in this category are pushing the boundaries of what those disciplines can do, particularly in the context of seismic resilience, ageing infrastructure, and the integration of data and digital tools into structural analysis and assessment.

8. Bilal M. Ayyub

Bilal M. Ayyub is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland and director of its Center for Technology and Systems Management. His research on infrastructure resilience and sustainability has made him one of the most cited voices in the engineering literature on how to prepare critical systems for extreme weather, sea level rise, and other climate-driven hazards. He received ASCE's Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award for education in 2024, recognising his contributions to both research and professional development in the field.

Ayyub has been a leading voice in the collaboration between ASCE and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to share data and enhance infrastructure standards for climate resilience. His ASCE manuals of practice on climate and hazard resilience are among the most practically useful resources available to engineers navigating the intersection of infrastructure design and a changing climate.

9. Jerome F. Hajjar

Jerome F. Hajjar is the CDM Smith Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He was named to ASCE's 2026 class of distinguished members, the highest honour the society confers, in recognition of his contributions to structural engineering knowledge and education. He was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022. His research focuses on the behaviour of steel and composite structures under extreme loading conditions, including earthquake and blast loads.

Hajjar has led or contributed to research programmes that have fundamentally changed how structural engineers think about building performance in high-seismic zones. His contributions to the AISC Committee on Specifications have influenced engineering practice across the United States. Beyond his technical contributions, he has been a committed advocate for engineering education, serving as past president of ASCE's Structural Engineering Institute and championing sustainability, resilience, and equity in structural design.

10. Cary Kopczynski

Cary Kopczynski is the CEO and senior principal of Cary Kopczynski and Company, a structural engineering firm he founded that has become synonymous with the transformation of Seattle's skyline over three decades. He received ASCE's 2024 Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award for construction, recognising a career built on structural innovation that has produced twelve high-rise towers of 24 stories or more in Seattle alone. He is a past president of the American Concrete Institute and has been named an ENR Top 25 Newsmaker twice.

Kopczynski's structural innovations are not purely aesthetic achievements: many involve genuine advances in how concrete and steel can be combined to produce taller, lighter, and more efficient structures than traditional methods allow. His firm's approach to collaborative structural design, working closely with architects rather than as downstream technical validators, has influenced how structural engineering firms position themselves in the design process.

11. Hazel McDonald

Dr Hazel McDonald has spent more than three decades in the management of highway structures, primarily with Transport Scotland, where she leads a 17-strong team responsible for the upkeep and upgrading of trunk road structures. A Fellow of the ICE and chair of the UK Bridges Board, she is one of the most significant voices in the relatively underrepresented field of bridge maintenance and asset management. Her PhD from the University of Strathclyde examined temperature effects in concrete box-girder bridges, and that technical foundation has underpinned a career focused on the life-cycle management of infrastructure assets.

McDonald's contribution to civil engineering thought is concentrated in a domain that is genuinely undervalued: the engineering knowledge required to keep complex infrastructure assets functioning safely over their design life is at least as demanding as the knowledge required to build them in the first place. Her institutional work at the UK Bridges Board is helping to build the professional consensus around best practice in bridge inspection, maintenance, and assessment that the profession urgently needs as bridge stocks age across the developed world.

12. Bhagi Hegde

Bhagi Hegde is a chartered civil engineer with 24 years of experience in geotechnical engineering for major infrastructure projects, currently working at RSK Group in the UK. Her project portfolio spans retaining walls, earthworks, ground improvement, and foundation design for clients including the Environment Agency, Natural Resources Wales, Network Rail, London Underground, and National Highways. She was named among the Top 20 Women in Ground Engineering 2026 in recognition of her technical contribution and her advocacy for diversity in the profession.

Hegde's journey from a modest background in India to a leadership role in UK infrastructure geotechnics is part of what makes her voice distinctive. As an ICE Approved Professional Reviewer and an active mentor, she uses her position to help the next generation of engineers navigate a profession that has historically been inaccessible to people from backgrounds like hers. Her advocacy for diversity is grounded in her own experience of the profession, not in abstract principle.

13. Naik El-Khoury

Naik El-Khoury is a Canadian civil engineer whose work on green infrastructure has placed him at the forefront of an important shift in how the profession thinks about stormwater management, urban hydrology, and the integration of nature-based solutions into conventional civil engineering practice. His research and consulting work have contributed to the growing body of evidence that green infrastructure approaches, from bioswales and rain gardens to green roofs and permeable pavements, can achieve drainage outcomes comparable to conventional grey infrastructure at lower long-term cost and with significantly greater co-benefits for biodiversity and community wellbeing.

El-Khoury's contribution extends beyond technical practice to the communication challenge of persuading municipalities, developers, and infrastructure owners to take nature-based approaches seriously in a profession that has historically defaulted to concrete and pipe. His work sits at the intersection of civil engineering, landscape design, and environmental science, making him a valuable bridge-builder across disciplines that have traditionally operated in silos.

14. Dervilla Mitchell

Dervilla Mitchell is a director and deputy chair of Arup, one of the world's largest and most respected engineering and design firms. She has led multi-disciplinary engineering programmes including Portcullis House in Westminster and a two-billion-dollar airport development in Abu Dhabi, and has been project director for major infrastructure schemes across the UK and internationally. As one of only four female engineers in her graduating class of 200, she has been a visible advocate for gender diversity in the profession for her entire career.

Mitchell's engineering leadership at Arup has been characterised by a commitment to genuinely multi-disciplinary working, bringing together structural, civil, mechanical, and environmental engineers on complex projects in ways that produce better outcomes than discipline-siloed approaches. Her contributions to the engineering community extend through the Institution of Structural Engineers and the Royal Academy of Engineering, where she has contributed to research and education programmes aimed at broadening participation in engineering.

Category 3: Transportation and Urban Infrastructure

Transportation is often the most visible sub-discipline of civil engineering to the general public: roads, bridges, rail networks, and public transit are experienced daily by billions of people. The seven thinkers in this category are shaping how the profession thinks about transportation design, urban mobility, and the relationship between infrastructure and community.

15. Roger Millar

Roger Millar served as secretary of transportation for Washington State from 2016 to January 2025, overseeing an annual budget of approximately 3.5 billion dollars. He subsequently founded Millar Consulting Services. He received ASCE's 2024 Outstanding Projects and Leaders Award for government and is an ASCE Distinguished Member, recognising a career in which engineering expertise has been combined with political skill to advance transportation outcomes in the public interest. He was also 2022-23 president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

Complete Streets is one of the most significant conceptual innovations in transportation engineering in recent decades: the principle that roads and streets should be safe, convenient, and pleasant regardless of transportation mode, not just for cars. Millar's advocacy for this approach, and his success in embedding it in state DOT practice in Washington and through the National Complete Streets Coalition, which has been adopted as policy in 30 US states, represents exactly the kind of policy-shaping thought leadership that the civil engineering profession needs more of.

16. Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy

Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and one of the leading researchers in sustainable transportation infrastructure in the United States. Her work spans transportation systems analysis, infrastructure performance measurement, sustainable development, and the equity dimensions of transportation decision-making. Born in Ghana, she brings a genuinely cross-cultural perspective to questions about how infrastructure investment decisions are made, who benefits from them, and who bears their costs.

Her research has contributed to the development of frameworks for evaluating the sustainability performance of transportation systems at the network level, moving the profession beyond project-by-project assessment toward systems-level thinking about how transportation infrastructure shapes communities over time. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and has served on the Transportation Research Board, the premier research body for transportation engineering policy in the United States.

17. Kwadwo Amankwah-Nkyi

Kwadwo Amankwah-Nkyi is a traffic and intelligent systems engineer at Jacobs Engineering Group and one of ASCE's 2026 New Faces of Civil Engineering, one of the most prestigious early-career recognitions in the US profession. His work on traffic systems engineering and intelligent transportation systems places him at the frontier of how civil engineers are integrating sensor networks, data analytics, and connected vehicle technology into the design and operation of transportation infrastructure.

Amankwah-Nkyi represents a generation of civil engineers who grew up with data as a natural part of engineering practice, and whose approach to transportation design reflexively integrates digital tools in ways that earlier generations have had to learn after the fact. His recognition as a 2026 New Face of Civil Engineering signals not only his individual achievement but the profession's recognition that intelligent systems are now central to transportation engineering practice.

18. Uma Lakshman

Uma Lakshman is a roadway designer at H&H and a 2025 New Face of Civil Engineering, recognised by ASCE for her early-career contributions to transportation engineering and her advocacy for equity in the profession. She has written and spoken about the cultural and structural barriers facing women and other underrepresented groups in civil engineering, particularly in the fieldwork-intensive apprenticeship phase of the career, where the profession's culture has historically been least welcoming to people from diverse backgrounds.

Lakshman's perspective combines technical competence in transportation design with a clear-eyed analysis of why the profession's culture is changing more slowly than its demographics. Her contributions to ASCE publications and her engagement with professional development programmes for early-career engineers demonstrate a commitment to the profession that goes beyond technical practice. She is an ENV SP sustainability credential holder.

19. Allison de Cerreno

Allison de Cerreno is the Chief Operating Officer of MTA Bridges and Tunnels in New York City, overseeing some of the most critical and heavily used civil infrastructure in the United States. Named one of ENR's Top 25 Newsmakers in 2025, she manages an agency responsible for seven major bridges and two tunnels that carry more than 300 million vehicles annually. Her leadership of complex civil infrastructure at this scale makes her one of the most operationally experienced women in public civil engineering in the world.

De Cerreno's contribution to the field is concentrated in the domain of infrastructure operations and management, an area that receives far less public attention than infrastructure construction but that is at least as consequential for the daily experience of the people who use it. Her work at MTA Bridges and Tunnels involves managing the tension between operational continuity and the need for major rehabilitation projects on infrastructure that was designed in the mid-20th century.

20. Jayantha Obeysekera

Jayantha Obeysekera is a professor and research associate at Florida International University's Sea Level Solutions Center, where his research focuses on sea level rise, coastal engineering, and the water management challenges facing low-elevation coastal zones. Born in Sri Lanka, he brings a global perspective to challenges that are most pressing in coastal areas of the United States, South and Southeast Asia, and small island developing states. His work on adaptive water management for communities living with rising seas is directly relevant to the infrastructure challenges facing hundreds of millions of people.

Obeysekera has worked extensively with the South Florida Water Management District, one of the most complex water management agencies in the world, and with international research networks spanning multiple continents. His engagement with both technical research and applied water policy gives him a practical understanding of what it takes to translate engineering knowledge into the infrastructure decisions that will determine whether coastal communities can adapt in place over the coming decades.

21. Prianka Srinivasan

Prianka Srinivasan is an engineering manager and ASCE contributor whose work focuses on transportation planning and the integration of equity into transportation decision-making. She is an active presence in ASCE's professional development community and writes about the intersection of transportation engineering, urban planning, and the social outcomes of infrastructure investment. Her contributions to professional forums on engineering ethics, equity, and the responsibilities of civil engineers to the communities they serve represent a thoughtful and practical approach to the field's evolving professional obligations.

Srinivasan's thought leadership is expressed through professional forums, LinkedIn content, and contributions to ASCE's publications and professional development programmes. Her perspective on the relationship between transportation engineering and community equity has made her a valued voice in conversations about what responsible transportation practice looks like in the 21st century.

Category 4: Water, Environment and Climate Resilience

Water is at once the most fundamental civil engineering challenge and the one most directly shaped by climate change. The eight people in this category are working on the engineering of water systems, coastal resilience, environmental quality, and the adaptation of infrastructure to a climate that is shifting faster than most infrastructure was designed to accommodate.

22. Pedro J.J. Alvarez

Pedro J.J. Alvarez is the George Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University and director of the Rice WaTER Institute. Named to ASCE's 2026 class of distinguished members and awarded the 2026 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Civil Engineering, he has published over 450 peer-reviewed papers on topics ranging from nanotechnology for water treatment to the remediation of contaminated sites and the engineering of water reuse systems. His work on emerging contaminants, particularly per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), has directly informed regulatory policy in the United States and internationally.

Alvarez leads Rice's Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Engineering Research Center, which is developing next-generation water treatment technologies for communities without access to centralised treatment infrastructure. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, demonstrating the global reach of his influence on environmental and water engineering practice.

23. Costa Samaras

Costa Samaras is the Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. From 2021 to 2024, he served at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as principal assistant director for energy and OSTP chief advisor for the clean energy transition. He was lead author of the Mitigation Chapter of the 6th US National Climate Assessment.

Samaras's research at Carnegie Mellon focuses on the engineering and policy challenges of decarbonising electricity, transportation, and industrial systems in the United States, with particular attention to grid resilience to extreme weather, the electricity demands of data centres, and the integration of distributed energy resources into power systems. His combination of research credibility, policy experience, and public communication skills makes him one of the most genuinely influential voices at the intersection of civil engineering and climate policy.

24. Dipak Gyawali

Dipak Gyawali is a water policy expert and author based at the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation in Kathmandu, and one of the most distinctive voices in the global conversation about water and infrastructure. A former minister of water resources in Nepal, he brings a rare combination of scientific expertise, political experience, and cross-cultural perspective to water engineering questions that are typically addressed within the narrower frame of North American or European practice. His work on what he calls the political economy of water examines how infrastructure decisions about water allocation, storage, and distribution are shaped by power, not just by engineering.

Gyawali is the co-author of Water and the Quest for Sustainable Development in the Ganges Valley and has written extensively on the social dimensions of large dam construction, the rights of communities displaced by infrastructure projects, and the governance failures that have made many major water infrastructure investments produce worse outcomes than their engineering designs promised. His perspective is genuinely challenging to the profession and represents exactly the kind of critical external voice that helps civil engineering institutions understand the full consequences of their work.

25. Paul Chinowsky

Paul Chinowsky is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research on the vulnerability of global infrastructure to climate change has produced some of the most practically useful assessments of what climate adaptation will cost and require from the civil engineering profession. His modelling of how temperature changes, precipitation shifts, and extreme weather events will affect road surfaces, bridge structures, and water systems over multi-decade time horizons has given infrastructure planners a framework for understanding not just whether their assets are at risk but when, by how much, and at what cost.

Chinowsky has contributed to international research programmes on infrastructure and climate adaptation and has worked with national governments, development banks, and international organisations on the practical challenge of incorporating climate risk into infrastructure investment decisions. His work is particularly influential in the context of developing world infrastructure, where the combination of limited financial resources and high climate vulnerability creates the most urgent need for rigorous, evidence-based planning.

26. Dr Priya Parikh

Dr Priya Parikh is a researcher at Imperial College London and a trustee of the Institution of Civil Engineers whose work on infrastructure and equity in the developing world has made her one of the most distinctive voices in the profession globally. She has more than 20 years of engineering consultancy experience in the UK, Asia, and Africa, including work with slum communities to design infrastructure. In 2019, the Royal Academy of Engineering and Bboxx awarded her a five-year fellowship to research how smart solar technology can improve access to energy in sub-Saharan Africa.

Apolitical named Parikh one of its 100 Most Influential Academics in Government in 2021. The following year, she received a Top 50 Women in Engineering Award from the Women's Engineering Society. She sits on the board of the Happold Foundation, a charity helping engineers participate in humanitarian projects around the world. Her combination of technical expertise, fieldwork in some of the world's most challenging infrastructure environments, and institutional advocacy makes her one of the genuinely irreplaceable voices on this list.

27. Sreevalsa Kolathayar

Sreevalsa Kolathayar is an associate professor of civil engineering at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka in India and one of the most productive researchers in South Asian geotechnical engineering and disaster risk reduction. He co-edited the proceedings of the ICC IDEA 2025 international conference on civil engineering innovation, contributing to the dissemination of cutting-edge research on sustainable and smart infrastructure development. His research spans earthquake geotechnical engineering, liquefaction hazard assessment, and the engineering challenges of infrastructure construction in geologically complex regions.

Kolathayar's work is particularly significant for the engineering challenges facing South Asian countries, where rapid urbanisation, complex geology, and high seismic and hydrological hazard create some of the most demanding infrastructure conditions in the world. His active participation in international research networks and conferences keeps him connected to the global frontier of geotechnical practice, while his teaching and mentoring at NIT Karnataka ensures that his influence on the next generation of Indian civil engineers is substantial and practical.

28. Jayantha Obeysekera

(Listed at entry 20 above.)

29. Arthur Antoine

Arthur Antoine is a civil engineer, project manager, and researcher whose 2025 Springer book Civil Engineering in the Developing World: A Guide to Successful and Sustainable Project Delivery addresses one of the most consequential and underserved topics in the field: how to deliver infrastructure in contexts where the assumptions that underpin conventional project management do not hold. With more than 20 years of experience in infrastructure development across the Caribbean, North America, and other developing world contexts, he draws on an unusually rich combination of fieldwork and research.

Antoine's framework for infrastructure project delivery in developing world contexts, which integrates attention to procurement, risk, schedule, cost, and community engagement in ways that respond to the specific governance and logistical challenges of those environments, is a practical contribution to a conversation that too often gets stuck at the level of abstract principle.

Category 5: Digital Transformation and Innovation in Civil Engineering

The digital transformation of civil engineering, encompassing building information modelling, digital twins, AI in structural analysis, sensor networks, and construction technology, is changing the profession at a pace that many practitioners find challenging to keep up with. The people in this category are mapping the frontier and helping the profession navigate it.

30. Kamlesh Kumar Maurya

Kamlesh Kumar Maurya is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a BIM specialist at WSP, where he leads the development of building information modelling for major projects including High Speed Two, the largest infrastructure project in UK history. His expertise sits at the intersection of digital engineering practice and the cultural change required to realise its benefits: getting large engineering organisations to adopt new ways of working is at least as challenging as mastering the technology itself.

Maurya's advocacy for BIM as a tool for managing the design, construction, and operation of complex infrastructure has been influential within the ICE and across the UK construction sector. His mentoring work and commitment to nurturing a culture of innovation and continuous learning within his teams reflects an understanding that technology adoption is a people challenge as much as a technical one. He is also a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

31. Erin Khan

Erin Khan is a digital transformation leader in the construction sector and an active advocate for women in construction and technology. Her work focuses on helping construction and civil engineering organisations modernise their operations through the adoption of digital tools, integrated project delivery approaches, and cultural change programmes that make new technologies actually stick. She brings a practitioner's perspective to digital transformation, having navigated the implementation challenges that arise when organisations try to change established workflows and cultures.

Khan's LinkedIn presence is characterised by direct, practical content about what digital transformation actually looks like on the ground in engineering and construction organisations. Her advocacy for women in the sector is grounded in her own experience of navigating a male-dominated industry while building expertise in a domain that has historically attracted few women.

32. Fred Mills

Fred Mills is the founder of The B1M, the world's largest video channel dedicated to construction and civil engineering, with more than 2.8 million YouTube subscribers and 24 million viewers each month. His contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is primarily one of communication: making the built environment accessible, exciting, and meaningful to audiences that would not otherwise engage with it. The B1M's documentaries on megaprojects, engineering challenges, and the people who build the world are watched by a global audience that includes professionals, students, and general viewers.

Mills has used The B1M's reach to champion the profession's role in addressing climate change, the skills crisis, and the infrastructure gap. His ability to produce high-quality, engaging content about complex engineering topics has made him an effective ambassador for civil engineering at a moment when public understanding of what the profession does and why it matters is urgently needed.

33. AJ Waters

AJ Waters is a construction technologist focused on helping civil engineering and construction teams adopt digital tools effectively. His LinkedIn content consistently bridges the gap between technological vision and operational reality, providing practical guidance on technology adoption, implementation challenges, and the cultural changes that determine whether new tools actually change outcomes or are simply layered on top of existing workflows. His grounded, experience-based approach to digital transformation distinguishes him from commentators who focus on technology for its own sake.

Waters's perspective is shaped by direct experience of the implementation challenges that arise when organisations try to change their workflows around new digital platforms. His contributions to conversations about BIM adoption, digital twin implementation, and the integration of data analytics into project delivery have been well received by engineering and construction professionals seeking practical guidance.

34. Jason Schroeder

Jason Schroeder is the founder of Elevate Construction and the author of Elevating Construction Superintendents, a book that has become a widely used resource for frontline leaders in civil construction. His platform focuses on Lean principles, team culture, and the development of construction site leaders who can manage not only the physical complexity of large civil works but the human and organisational complexity that determines whether construction projects are delivered on time and on budget. He hosts a podcast and is actively engaged on LinkedIn with field-level practical content.

Schroeder's contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is concentrated in the domain of construction operations and site leadership, areas that directly determine whether engineering designs are realised effectively. His focus on the human dimensions of construction, respect for field crews, continuous improvement culture, and the development of supervisory capability represents an important complement to more technically focused thought leadership in the profession.

35. Stefanie Reichman

Stefanie Reichman is a licensed civil engineer and the co-founder of AEC Tech Jobs, a platform helping engineers in the architecture, engineering, and construction sector navigate career pivots into technology roles. Her content helps engineers understand how their technical skills translate into value in a changing job market, and how to position themselves for roles at the intersection of engineering practice and digital transformation. Her mission, in her own words, is to help engineers be more than an engineer, which speaks directly to the career development anxieties and aspirations of a profession whose work is increasingly mediated by technology.

Reichman's contribution to the thought leadership landscape of civil engineering addresses what it means for civil engineers to navigate the digital transformation of their own profession rather than just delivering it to clients. She is actively engaged on LinkedIn and has built a following among engineers who are thinking about where their careers can take them in a changing industry.

36. Doanh Do

Doanh Do is the editor of the Lean Construction Blog and a leading expert in Lean Construction with a particular focus on Target Value Delivery, a management approach that drives the design and construction of infrastructure projects to deliver value to customers within project constraints. He has worked and studied under the founders of the Lean Construction movement and has applied Lean principles to more than 2.5 billion US dollars of design and construction projects. His blog is one of the most valuable freely available resources for civil engineers seeking to improve project delivery.

Do's contribution to civil engineering thought leadership lies in the domain of project delivery methodology. His consistent argument that Lean principles represent not just efficiency tools but a fundamentally different approach to how construction projects are conceived and executed has influenced how a generation of civil engineers and construction managers think about their work.

37. Chiara Bianchini

Dr Chiara Bianchini is a sustainability engineer and climate advocate based in Europe whose LinkedIn content is among the most substantive and analytically rigorous in the engineering field. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice in STEM and a strong advocate for women in engineering leadership, combining technical insight with systems thinking in posts that break down how infrastructure intersects with carbon goals, policy, and long-term climate resilience. Her work addresses the carbon embedded in civil infrastructure and the engineering pathways to reducing it.

Bianchini's contribution is particularly valuable for the way it connects the technical detail of engineering decision-making with the policy and market context in which those decisions are made. Her posts are engaged with seriously by engineering professionals across Europe and beyond. She brings an Italian and European perspective to sustainability conversations that are too often dominated by North American and British voices.

Category 6: Equity, Inclusion and Next-Generation Voices

Civil engineering has a representation problem. Women make up only 17% of civil engineers in the United States, and the profession's demographics in most high-income countries are significantly less diverse than the populations they serve. The people in this category are either working directly to change those numbers or representing the next generation of the profession from parts of the world that global thought leadership conversations often ignore.

38. Rachel Hayden

Rachel Hayden is a UK civil engineer who was named among the Women's Engineering Society's Top 50 Women in Engineering in 2025 and is a past participant in the ICE President's Future Leaders programme. She is an active STEM Ambassador who draws on her own experience of being inspired to pursue engineering by an outreach event at school, and uses that experience to advocate for early intervention as the most effective lever for increasing diversity in the profession. Her message that everyone can help grow the number of women in the profession is grounded in the specific action of STEM outreach rather than abstract commitment.

Hayden's contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is primarily in the domain of professional culture and pipeline development. Her ICE involvement and WES recognition have given her a platform to advocate for the structural changes that make engineering more accessible to women and other underrepresented groups, not just the inspirational messaging that too often substitutes for genuine change.

39. Eduardo Netto

Eduardo Netto is a World Bank infrastructure specialist whose career has focused on the financing, design, and governance of major infrastructure programmes in developing economies. Working across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, he brings a perspective on infrastructure that is shaped by the specific challenges of delivering complex projects in environments where institutional capacity, governance, and financing are as challenging as the engineering. He is active on LinkedIn, where his content addresses the gap between infrastructure need and infrastructure delivery in the world's most underserved economies.

Netto's contribution to the global civil engineering conversation is about the political economy and governance of infrastructure investment. His work makes the case that the engineering quality of a project is determined as much by the quality of its procurement, governance, and stakeholder engagement as by the quality of its design, an argument that is increasingly important as the civil engineering profession works to understand why so many major infrastructure projects underperform.

40. Catherine Karakatsanis

Catherine Karakatsanis is President of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and Senior Vice President at Stantec, having previously served as president of Engineers Canada (2012-13) and as FIDIC president. Her leadership across the engineering profession's most important Canadian and international bodies has focused consistently on equity, diversity, and inclusion in engineering education and practice. Engineers Canada's work on developing equity-focused engineering programmes, including the audacious 30 by 30 goal to increase the proportion of women newly licensed as professional engineers to 30 percent by 2030, advanced substantially under her leadership.

Karakatsanis is a structural engineer by training who joined Morrison Hershfield (now Stantec) and rose to become Chief Operating Officer before her current role as Senior Vice President. Her advocacy is grounded in decades of practice in a field that has historically underrepresented women, giving her a practical authority that purely institutional voices often lack. She is active on LinkedIn and continues to contribute to conversations about what a more equitable engineering profession looks like in practice.

41. Roni Savage

Roni Savage is the founder of Jomas Associates, an environmental and engineering consultancy, and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers since 2019. She has built a profile as a bold advocate for sustainability and diversity in civil engineering, most notably when she spoke out against comments made about girls and STEM, providing a direct engineering counterargument that received significant attention. She was shortlisted for Veuve Clicquot's 2022 Bold Woman Award, which celebrates excellence in female leadership.

Savage's career demonstrates what is possible when engineering expertise is combined with a willingness to engage publicly with controversies that affect the profession. Her work with Jomas Associates has shown that environmental and engineering consulting can be done with a strong commitment to sustainability and social value. She is active on LinkedIn and contributes to professional forums on engineering ethics and culture.

42. Sarah Keenihan

Sarah Keenihan is a science communicator affiliated with Engineers Australia who has built a significant presence explaining engineering and science to general audiences. Her LinkedIn content bridges the gap between technical engineering practice and public understanding, a role that is increasingly important for a profession whose work shapes public life in profound ways but that has historically communicated poorly to non-technical audiences. Based in Australia, she brings a Pacific perspective to global conversations about science and engineering communication.

Keenihan's contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is primarily in the domain of public communication and professional advocacy. Her work demonstrates that engineering expertise does not automatically come with the communication skills required to make it influential, and that engineers who invest in those skills can generate public understanding and support for the profession's work in ways that purely technical communication cannot.

43. Maimunah Mohd Sharif

Maimunah Mohd Sharif served as executive director of UN-Habitat from 2018 to 2024, leading the United Nations agency responsible for sustainable urban development and urban infrastructure. Based in Malaysia, she brought to the role a combination of local government experience as mayor of Penang, and a commitment to making cities more equitable, sustainable, and resilient. Her leadership of UN-Habitat during the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the 2022 World Urban Forum outcome documents placed her at the centre of the global conversation about what sustainable urban infrastructure means in practice.

Her contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is concentrated in the domain of urban governance and the relationship between infrastructure investment, urban form, and quality of life in cities across the developing world. Her work demonstrated that urban infrastructure decisions are never purely technical: they are shaped by governance, politics, financing, and the distribution of power in cities, and the most effective infrastructure advocates understand all of these dimensions.

44. Tarekegn Ayalew

Tarekegn Ayalew is a senior engineer at the Ethiopian Roads Administration whose career has been devoted to road infrastructure development in one of Africa's fastest-growing economies. His work spans road design, construction, and management in a context where infrastructure investment is a direct lever of economic development, poverty reduction, and national integration. As one of the very few African civil engineers with significant visibility in the global engineering community, his perspective on infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa brings a voice to the conversation that is systematically underrepresented in North American and European thought leadership forums.

Ayalew's contribution to the global civil engineering conversation is about what infrastructure development looks like from the ground up in a rapidly developing economy. His experience of the specific engineering, logistical, governance, and financing challenges of road construction in Ethiopia provides context that enriches the global profession's understanding of what infrastructure development actually requires in the world's fastest-growing continent.

Category 7: Sustainability, Climate Adaptation and Next-Generation Infrastructure

The final category brings together voices who are working on the most consequential challenge facing the civil engineering profession: designing, building, and maintaining infrastructure in the context of a rapidly changing climate, without the carbon emissions that built the infrastructure stock of the past century.

45. Lars Ostenfeld Riemann

Lars Ostenfeld Riemann is the Group CEO of COWI, one of the world's leading engineering consultancies, headquartered in Denmark. Under his leadership, COWI has developed an explicit commitment to sustainability-led engineering practice, embedding climate adaptation and decarbonisation considerations into how the firm approaches every project. His leadership of a major international engineering consultancy gives him both the platform and the implementation experience to speak with authority about what sustainability means in practice for large infrastructure programmes.

Riemann's contribution to civil engineering thought leadership is concentrated in the domain of organisational strategy and the transformation of large engineering firms toward more sustainable practice. His experience leading COWI through a period of significant growth and diversification provides lessons that are relevant to engineering organisations of every scale.

46. Mette Ina Iversen

Mette Ina Iversen is a sustainability specialist at COWI whose work focuses on integrating climate adaptation and environmental considerations into the design and assessment of infrastructure projects. Her contribution to the sustainability conversation in civil engineering is practical and technically grounded, engaging with the specific engineering challenges of designing infrastructure that can perform over a 50-100 year design life in a climate that will be significantly different from the one it was designed for.

Iversen's work on life cycle assessment of civil infrastructure, the integration of nature-based solutions into engineering design, and the embedding of sustainability criteria into infrastructure procurement represents the technical frontier of what sustainable civil engineering practice looks like. Her contribution is less about public communication and more about the technical and institutional mechanisms through which sustainability becomes operational in engineering practice.

47. Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar is a professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi whose research spans geotechnical engineering, disaster risk reduction, and the engineering challenges of infrastructure construction in Himalayan and other complex geological environments. His work on landslide risk, earthquake geotechnics, and the performance of embankment dams and slopes in seismically active zones is directly relevant to the infrastructure challenges facing India and the broader South Asian region.

Kumar's contribution to global civil engineering thought leadership is through his research, his engagement with international geotechnical organisations, and his role in shaping the engineering understanding of geological risk in South Asia. His perspective on the specific challenges of infrastructure construction in geologically complex developing world environments provides essential context for international conversations about infrastructure resilience.

48. Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz is a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, published by Flatiron Books in 2021. His research on the cognitive and institutional biases that cause engineers, policymakers, and organisations to systematically favour adding more over subtracting or simplifying has produced one of the most genuinely original contributions to engineering thought in recent years. The book was widely reviewed in general interest publications and reached an audience well beyond the civil engineering community.

Klotz's argument that the instinct to add is so deeply embedded in professional and cognitive habits that it requires deliberate institutional effort to overcome has direct implications for how civil engineers approach everything from materials specification to project scope management to the design of infrastructure systems. His research has been applied in engineering education, product design, organisational management, and policy, demonstrating that a genuinely civil engineering insight can have far broader cultural resonance than the profession typically manages. His new book In a Good Place was published in April 2026.

49. Dipak Gyawali

(Featured in Category 4, Entry 24.)

50. Roshni Bakta

Roshni Bakta is a structural engineer based in the United Kingdom whose work on diversity, inclusion, and the cultural barriers facing underrepresented groups in the civil engineering profession has made her a visible and credible advocate for change. As a woman of colour working in structural engineering, she brings a perspective on the profession's culture and barriers that is both technically grounded and personally experienced, giving her advocacy a credibility that purely institutional voices often lack.

Her contributions to conversations about what a more inclusive civil engineering profession looks like in practice span professional forums, LinkedIn content, and engagement with engineering education institutions. She is active in UK engineering professional networks and contributes to programmes designed to make the profession more accessible to people from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several civil engineering voices were seriously considered for this list but did not make the final 50. Grady Hillhouse, creator of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel, is one of the most effective communicators about civil engineering to a general audience, with over four million YouTube subscribers and a book Engineering in Plain Sight that makes infrastructure accessible to non-engineers. The editorial choice to prioritise voices building their professional profile in the mid-tier LinkedIn space rather than established broadcast channels meant he was not included. His work is strongly recommended.

Melissa Lott, Director of Research at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, is one of the most credible voices at the intersection of energy and infrastructure policy. Her expertise is primarily in energy systems rather than civil engineering practice, and the editorial decision to focus on practitioners with more direct civil engineering credentials meant she was not included.

Brené Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most leadership lists. Their work has shaped how professionals think about their roles, and civil engineers read them as widely as anyone. The editorial choice here was to surface voices rooted in the specific practice and context of civil engineering rather than to repeat names the reader has almost certainly already encountered.

Common Mistakes Civil Engineers Make When Engaging with Thought Leadership

The first and most common mistake is engaging with thought leadership as a passive activity. Following someone on LinkedIn or subscribing to their newsletter is not the same as actually incorporating their thinking into how you work. The most effective professional development in civil engineering is active: it involves taking a specific insight from a specific thinker and testing it against a specific challenge you are currently facing. Passive consumption of content produces familiarity without transformation.

The second mistake is limiting your thought leadership diet to your own sub-discipline. A structural engineer who reads only structural engineering content will eventually hit the ceiling of what her sub-discipline can tell her. The most creative and effective civil engineers are those who read across sub-disciplines, borrowing frameworks from water resources, or urban planning, or geotechnical practice, and applying them to problems in their own domain.

The third mistake is ignoring thought leaders from the developing world or from non-English-speaking countries. The challenges and innovations emerging from infrastructure practice in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America are often more relevant to the global infrastructure challenge than the solutions being developed in high-income countries with mature infrastructure systems. Dipak Gyawali's perspective on water governance is more challenging and more useful to a civil engineer working in a complex institutional environment than most of what appears in North American professional journals.

The fourth mistake is treating thought leadership as a substitute for peer-reviewed research. The people on this list are producing content that is accessible, stimulating, and professionally useful. They are not a replacement for the careful, rigorous, methodologically sound research that the profession also needs. The best professional development diet combines both: thought leadership for inspiration and orientation, peer-reviewed research for the technical depth to act on those insights responsibly.

The fifth mistake is failing to contribute as well as consume. The thought leadership landscape in civil engineering is relatively thin compared to fields like software engineering or management consulting. Engineers who have something to say have a genuine obligation to share that knowledge. LinkedIn is a low-barrier channel through which any civil engineer can begin to contribute to the profession's public knowledge base.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Civil Engineering Thought Leadership Practice

Start by identifying which of the ten sub-disciplines covered in this guide are most directly relevant to your current work. Pick two or three thinkers whose work sits in those domains and commit to following their output for 60 days. Do not just follow: engage. Comment on posts that provoke a genuine response. Share content with a specific note about why you think it matters for your professional community.

Create a simple system for capturing what you learn. It does not have to be elaborate: a brief note at the end of the working week recording one idea you encountered that changed how you think about something is sufficient. After 90 days, review those notes. The patterns they reveal about which thinkers and which ideas are genuinely moving your thinking will tell you where to invest your attention.

Diversify your geography deliberately. If your feed is dominated by North American and British voices, make a conscious effort to follow engineers from South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Scandinavia. The infrastructure challenges and the engineering responses to them look different from those vantage points, and that difference is productive for your thinking. Use the list in this guide as a starting point.

Join ASCE, ICE, or your national engineering professional body and engage with its thought leadership activities. The podcasts, journals, webinars, and conferences produced by these bodies are among the most efficient ways to stay connected to the frontier of the profession. Peter O'Neil's Plot Points podcast and the ICE's recorded lectures from events like Inspiring Engineering Excellence are freely available and consistently substantive.

If you lead an engineering team, consider bringing in an external facilitator to help your team engage systematically with the ideas that matter most for your organisation. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), who works with engineering and infrastructure leadership teams to help them turn the ideas championed by the profession's best thinkers into practical, aligned leadership action. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a thought leader in civil engineering?

A thought leader in civil engineering is a practitioner, researcher, advocate, or communicator whose ideas, frameworks, and public engagement are actively shaping how the profession thinks about its work, its responsibilities, and its future. The term does not require institutional authority: it requires the combination of genuine expertise and a willingness to share it publicly in ways that influence others.

How was this list compiled?

The 50 civil engineering thought leaders on this list were selected based on their credentialled expertise in the field, their active contribution to public conversations through books, podcasts, LinkedIn, conferences, or institutional leadership, the disciplinary and geographic diversity of their perspectives, and their genuine contribution to advancing how the profession thinks. The list deliberately prioritises voices the reader may not have already encountered, spanning structural, geotechnical, transportation, water resources, environmental, digital, and sustainability sub-disciplines, and representing practitioners from six continents.

What makes civil engineering different from other engineering disciplines?

Civil engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical built environment, including roads, bridges, dams, tunnels, water systems, stormwater networks, and structural foundations. It is distinct from mechanical engineering (machines and systems), electrical engineering (power and electronics), and chemical engineering (processes and materials), though it overlaps with environmental engineering, structural engineering, and urban planning.

Who are the most influential women in civil engineering today?

The most influential women in civil engineering today include Maria Lehman (past ASCE president), Marsha Anderson Bomar (current ASCE president), Anusha Shah (current ICE president), Rachel Skinner (WSP, past ICE president), Adjo Amekudzi-Kennedy (Georgia Tech), Patricia Galloway (first female ASCE president), Dr Priya Parikh (Imperial College London), Bhagi Hegde (RSK Group), and many others profiled in this guide.

Can I hire someone to facilitate civil engineering leadership workshops or strategic sessions for my team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast, who works with engineering and infrastructure leadership teams globally. His facilitation work helps engineering organisations build the team culture, communication, and strategic alignment that allows them to execute effectively on complex projects. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What civil engineering sub-disciplines have the most active thought leadership communities?

Software and digital tools have attracted significant LinkedIn communities around construction technology and BIM. Transportation engineering has strong professional communities through ASCE and through forums on sustainable mobility. Structural engineering has active LinkedIn groups, particularly around seismic design. Water resources has strong communities through ASCE's Environmental and Water Resources Institute. Sustainability and climate adaptation are rapidly growing as areas of active thought leadership.

What are the best podcasts for civil engineers?

ASCE's Plot Points podcast is one of the most substantive freely available resources for civil engineering professionals. The B1M's YouTube channel produces documentary-style content about major infrastructure projects. Engineering Management Institute produces content relevant to civil engineers in leadership roles. Anthony Fasano's EMI podcast covers career development for engineers. Practical Engineering's YouTube content provides excellent technical explanations of civil engineering concepts.

Final Thoughts

Civil engineering is at an inflection point. The profession that built the infrastructure of the 20th century now faces the task of maintaining it, adapting it to a changing climate, decarbonising it, and extending it to the billions of people who still lack access to safe roads, clean water, reliable drainage, and resilient housing. The scale of that challenge is matched by the ambition of the people on this list, who are thinking seriously, communicating clearly, and leading with the kind of intellectual honesty that the profession's challenges demand.

The 50 voices in this guide represent the breadth and depth of what civil engineering thought leadership looks like when it is working well: technically grounded, geographically diverse, open to the profession's past failures, and serious about the changes required to make infrastructure investment a tool of genuine human development rather than a source of new problems.

The ideas these thinkers champion need to be turned into action in organisations, on project sites, in policy offices, and in boardrooms. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), works with leadership teams across infrastructure, engineering, and government sectors to make that translation happen. He facilitates executive offsites, leadership workshops, and team sessions that help organisations build the culture, communication, and strategic clarity that complex infrastructure challenges demand. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on the broader engineering and built environment landscape, check out my blog post 50 Best Thought Leaders in Architecture (2026)

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. 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.

Next Read: 50 Best Thought Leaders in Engineering (2026)

Engineering is the discipline that transforms ideas into reality. Whether you lead an engineering team at a startup, manage complex infrastructure projects, or are looking to sharpen your own engineering leadership skills, following the right thought leaders can accelerate your growth. The best thought leaders in engineering do not just share technical knowledge. They challenge how we think about teams, culture, innovation, decision-making, and the future of the profession itself.

This guide profiles 50 of the most influential thought leaders in engineering in 2026. From software engineering management pioneers and civil engineering innovators to aerospace visionaries and engineering education advocates, these are the voices shaping the future of engineering leadership.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/50-best-thought-leaders-in-engineering-2026