Shattering the stereotype of an ab- sent-minded professor, 20-year academic Gregory G. Deierlein is as focused as any design engineer. Illinois

Thanks to a quick-thinking bridge construction crew, a nearby crane and a brave man in a harness, a woman’s life was saved after the boat she and her husband were in slipped over a dam and left her trapped in a raging boil.

Turning 50 years of talk, stalled projects and storm wreckage into a $15-billion design and construction program that has rapidly built monumental storm-surge defenses around Greater New Orleans can only be achieved with smart, steady, determined and gutsy leadership.

Contractor Jeffrey D. Wagner calls the $84-million AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre “far and away the most challenging” job in his 21-year career.

How often did John R. Hillman, founder and president of Chicago-based HC Bridge Co., LLC, think about giving up on getting the industry to accept his hybrid bridge beam of concrete and steel with fiber-reinforced polymer materials?

Along Tenth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, the landscape is chocked with building projects, a marked contrast to the national commercial construction slump.

It's not good when one of the fastestgrowing counties in the country falls more than $386 million behind in roadbuilding.

Mark Loizeaux has imploded some 2,000 structures in his four-plus decades with Controlled Demolition Inc., which was started by his late father, John.

The year 2009 marked the midpoint and high-water mark in a seven-year-long flood of work at the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, with $27.7 billion in construction on the military-programs side and $15.6 billion on the civil-works side.

Like a protective parent, Mike Betz winces a little when people call the D7E a “hybrid” tractor. The diesel-electric dozer may have hybrid-like qualities.