Patricia “Pat” Galloway, who was a trailblazer in megaproject management and arbitration, as well as the first woman to serve as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, died Sept. 26 following a cancer diagnosis, according to her company, Pegasus-Global Holdings Inc. She was 67.
A licensed professional engineer and certified project management professional, Galloway was working as CEO of The Nielsen-Wurster Group Inc. when she was elected president of ASCE in 2003. She served in that role through 2004.
“Having achieved this accomplishment allowed me to pave the way and shatter that glass ceiling, serving as a role model to both young girls and women to be whatever they want to be and knowing they can achieve anything they desire to do,” Galloway wrote for EngineerGirl.org, a National Academy of Engineering website aimed at inspiring girls to enter careers in engineering.
Maria Lehman, past ASCE president, U.S. infrastructure lead at GHD and vice chair of the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council, calls Galloway a friend and mentor who “left an impact on a lot of us.”
“In the 20 years since Pat blew through the ceiling—it wasn’t a shatter, it was exploding through the ceiling—we’ve had eight women presidents of ASCE,” Lehman says.
As society president, Galloway brought big ideas and ensured the organization had a global presence, says Tom Smith, executive director.
“She was always someone who thought very big, not only [about] the complex, large projects that she worked on around the world, but her vision and her plans for the profession and for ASCE,” he says.
Courtesy National Academy of ConstructionGalloway helped manage large projects and mediate disputes that arose on them in her roles as chair and former CEO of Cle Elum, Wash.-based consultant Pegasus-Global Holdings. and as president of dispute resolution firm Galloway Arbitration. She was also a board member of Stantec and Granite Construction.
"The board will not be the same without her," said Granite CEO and President Kyle Larkin in a statement.
'Strong in Cost and Schedules'
Galloway worked on a wide variety of major projects during her career such as the Venice, Italy, flood protection project; the London Crossrail; Hong Kong’s Tsing Ma Bridge; CityLink highway project in Melbourne, Australia, and dozens of power plants.
“She was a really smart engineer, particularly strong in cost and schedules,” says John Borcherding, who worked with Galloway on the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station, a nuclear plant near the Gulf Coast.
Galloway also served a term as a member and vice chair of the National Science Board after being appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006, and was previously a member of the American Arbitration Association board and SCANA Corp. board of directors. She wrote a book published by ASCE in 2008, “The 21st-Century Engineer: A Proposal for Engineering Education Reform,” and jointly edited another published in 2012, “Managing Gigaprojects: Advice From Those Who've Been There, Done That.”
The books reflect Galloway’s commitment to education, Smith says. After Galloway earned her bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Purdue University and began working, she later earned an MBA from the New York Institute of Technology. In the early 2000s, she returned to school again at Kochi University of Technology in Japan to earn a PhD in infrastructure systems engineering.
Galloway was joined at Kochi by her first husband, Kris Nielsen, who died from cancer in 2013. The couple also went into business together, first at the Nielsen-Wurster Group and later at Pegasus after selling the former to Marsh. Lehman says Galloway and Nielsen were big believers in diversity in business and civil engineering.
“They walked the talk,” Lehman says. “Nielsen-Wurster probably had more women and minorities in it than they had older white guys, which, back in the ‘90s, was a big accomplishment.”
Galloway was also an early adopter of risk assessment, developing risk management plans and implementing project controls in the 1990s, and colleagues say her work impacted how many people thought about projects and project delivery. Her expertise made her sought out for projects around the world, and for works like Utah’s Interstate 15 reconstruction ahead of the 2002 Salt Lake City-hosted Olympics, which was one of the earliest major design-build projects in the U.S.
“They were doing risk management on megaprojects before we even knew what megaprojects were,” Lehman says.
Colleagues also recall Galloway’s fun-loving personality. She sometimes hosted ASCE district meetings at a winery she and Nielsen started in New Jersey, and was known for her dedication to dressing for a theme. Smith says she “made ASCE work fun.”
“She just lit up a room when she came in, and was one of those bigger-than-life personalities,” says George “Edd” Gibson, president and CEO of the National Academy of Construction, who was inducted into the group with Galloway in 2005. “She was a role model, and she was always about improving our industry.”
Galloway also had her own role models. She wrote and acted in a one-woman-act play about Emily Roebling, who took over construction management of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband, Washington Roebling, became ill from working in the bridge pier caissons. Galloway had been scheduled to resurrect the play for the ASCE convention in Tampa, Fla., this month.
Now, Lehman will perform it instead in tribute.
“She was always ahead of her time, and always a trailblazer in our industry for women,” Lehman says. “I lost a piece of my heart.”
A memorial service will be held on Oct. 19, 2:00PM at Unionville Ranch, 1750 Emerick Rd., Cle Elum, Wash. Contact Pegasus-Global Holdings Inc. for details.
