English

Civil engineer Dr. Susan Tighe was named one of Canada's Top 40 Under 40 for her leadership and vision supporting Canada's transportation community. Although her undergraduate degree was chemical engineering, she worked summers for the Ontario Ministry of Transportation and developed an interest in civil engineering materials, particularly pavements. She completed Masters and PhD degrees at the University of Waterloo and then carried on as a professor there. One of her major achievements was the publication of the Pavement Asset Design and Management Guide for the Transportation Association of Canada. Her other research has investigated polymer-modified asphalt, the use of nano materials in concrete and asphalt, the design of safe airfield runways, safety in construction work zones, and many other transportation-related topics. In her current role as Vice President, Academic and Provost of McMaster University, she continues to rely on her skills at project management, strategic thinking, and budgeting. She also describes some of her volunteer roles with the Transportation Association of Canada, the Canadian Technical Asphalt Association, and the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering, where she served as President.

Agricultural engineer Yves Choinière describes his work – he considers himself generalist who applies technology from many engineering disciplines to the creation of food. Over the past two decades, farming has been transformed by automation – for example: monitoring animal well being, milking robots, feeding robots in milk production; GPS-controlled tractors that optimize seeding, fertilizer or pesticide spraying. He works with specialists from civil engineering, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, food, chemical and food processing engineers. He selected a career in agricultural engineering because, he wanted to be an engineer and grew up on a farm – he still owns and operates a farm. He recalls the small, not very efficient, farms of the '80s and the re-engineering of farm production that was necessary to reduce workloads and enhance quality of life and productivity. At the time there was a deficit in Canadian food projection – Canada was not producing enough beef, chicken, vegetables and fruits to satisfy its own needs. He describes the development of natural ventilation systems for livestock housing, returning to the University of Ottawa to earn a Masters degree, supervised by Professor Tanaka, using wind engineering to develop systems for farm buildings. After a decade with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, he returned to Quebec to assume control of the family farm near Granby from his father. He started a private consulting company that rapidly grew - largely in response to the need for modern agricultural enterprises to be efficient – prices have not really changed over the past 40 years but costs have markedly increased.

Geotechnical engineer Kwan Yee Lo decided upon graduation in 1957 to do graduate research in soil mechanics at Imperial College London. His Masters of Science work was supervised by Professor Skempton, with Dr. Robert Gibson and visiting Professor Davis from the University of Sydney contributing significantly. In October 1959, he started at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, where he essentially was an assistant to Dr. Bjerrum there. He was encouraged by Cam Kenny, later Chair of the University of Toronto Civil Engineering Department, to emigrate to Canada, where he started working for Acres in 1961. His work there included design of the inlet and outlet structures of the Winnipeg Floodway. He then moved to the Ontario Department of Highways, where he tested a full-scale embankment to failure. He joined the University of Laval in 1965 and subsequently, in 1970, Western, where he worked in the areas of tunnels in soil and rock. His many projects included investigating distress at the Thorold Tunnel below the Welland Canal, which led to major changes in the approach to tunnel design in rock. He designed the intake and discharge tunnels at the Darlington Nuclear Plant – the in-situ stresses and time-dependent deformations predictions for the construction of the intake tunnel were sufficiently accurate that it was deemed unnecessary to drill boreholes in the lake or install extensive instrumentation for the discharge tunnel, realizing significant cost savings. He also worked on the Niagara Tunnel from Niagara Falls to Queenston and the Billy Bishop Airport Tunnel in Toronto. He and his graduate students developed means to strengthen clays using electrokinetic forces. He also contributed significantly to the Ontario Hydro (now Ontario Power Generation) Dam Safety Program, developing innovative methods to quantify the safety of 151 dams constructed before the Second World War.

Geotechnical engineer Peter Lighthall is a third-generation civil engineer who studied at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1971. His first job, for BC mining firm Placer Development, involved construction of a tailings dam to impound mine waste for a new mining operation. Earle Klohn, principal of the firm Klohn and Leonoff, was the principal designer. Two and a half years later, Lighthall was hired by Klohn and Leonoff, where worked on a number of overseas projects, in Kuwait, Maine, Poland, Minnesota, Utah, the Soviet Union, New Guinea, Chile, Peru, . He then spent a year earning a diploma from Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, and a Masters degree from the University of London. He returned to work and the Klohn and Leonoff head office in Richmond, and by the mid '80s was Manager of their Mining Division. In 1995, he moved to AGRA Earth & Environmental, and in 2008, after "retiring" he took his first job as an independent consultant. He describes various techniques used to construct tailings dams, including some that created dangerous structures, and recounts serious failures in British Columbia, and Brazil between 2014 and 2019 that caused widespread environmental destruction and human fatalities. He also advises new graduate Engineers in Training to "get out in the field, to see how things really work."