Top 25 Newsmakers

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As editor-in-chief, I have the special privilege every year of presenting the ENR Award of Excellence in New York City and helping make a video about the winner.

For his tireless drive to engineer enduring solutions for a disaster-plagued world and his persistent push for both technical innovation and seismic design information exchange, ENR’s editorial team has selected Kit Miyamoto to receive its 59th Award of Excellence.

Rouzbeh Savary became hooked on concrete as a youth in Tehran, when he would frequently tag along to jobsites with his developer-father Davood. Even as a 9-year-old, he was mesmerized by crews casting concrete for his father’s multistory buildings.

Brian Witte was just a freshman in high school when he launched his infrastructure career. “It was a small town in Iowa, and the teacher’s neighbor was the town engineer for a dozen communities,” recalls Witte, vice president of construction engineering for Parsons Corp. “They needed help.

North Dakotan Terry Williams is helping to manage the $3.2-billion Fargo-Moorhead Flood Diversion project, a first-of-its-kind endeavor.

Phil Washington grew up on the South Side of Chicago in public housing with a single mom caring for a family of six. “The people building infrastructure in my community did not look like me,” he says. “I wondered, ‘Why can’t I get a job helping to build my own community?’”

Carla Sciara began working in construction as a design drafter for an electrical contractor on its Four Seasons Hotel project in Manhattan—the first hotel designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei.

In 1968, the Whitehill Report on Professional and Public Education for Historic Preservation raised concerns about a dearth of tradespeople qualified in historic preservation work.

The eight-story 160-ft-square cube, open since September, is a subdued backdrop to the 9/11 Memorial’s reflecting pools.

Pei has had an affinity for wood for 20 of his 44 years. “It’s a natural material that is close to art and architecture,” says the associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.