Olin College of Engineering, a Needham, Mass.-based school known for its innovative and nontraditional curriculum, has named Gilda Barabino president, effective in July. She is currently dean of the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York.
Barabino succeeds Richard K. Miller, Olin’s first president, in the role since 1999. A chemical and biomedical engineer, she was elected last year to the National Academy of Engineering and received a White House STEM mentoring award in 2018.
Barabino now is the first woman to chair the American Society for Engineering Education Engineering Deans’ Council. The Princeton Review ranks Olin, with 386 current students, second for “best classroom experience.”
The Morganti Group Inc., a 104-year-old construction firm based in Danbury, Conn., has named Thamer Rushaidat president and CEO. He succeeds Nabil Takla, who remains a board director. Rushaidat, most recently deputy CEO and chief financial officer, joined the firm in 1995.
Jensen Hughes, a Baltimore consulting firm specializing in security and risk-based engineering, has named Pankaj Duggal president and COO. He had been a senior vice president at Jacobs and general manager of its federal and environmental solutions unit. He also was its business leader for U.S. government work globally. Jensen Hughes ranks at No. 73 on ENR’s Top 500 Design Firms list, reporting about $212 million in 2018 revenue. It is a portfolio company of Gryphon Investors, a private equity firm.
Bedford, N.H.-based consulting firm Normandeau Associates Inc. has elevated Curtis L. Thalken to CEO. Formerly senior vice president and COO, he succeeds Pam Hall, who now is executive vice president and continues as board of directors chair. Thalken is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New England District.
Mark H. Hasso, a well-known construction management professor for more than 30 years at Boston-based Wentworth Institute of Technology and former leader of its Building Construction Management program, who also was active in industry, died in Chestnut Hill, Mass., on March 16 of pancreatic cancer, a family member confirms. He was 73.
In a 2015 ENR profile of him as New England Legacy award winner, Leslie Becker, a graduate who was then a CM firm operations manager, said, “The group work we did in classes is exactly what I do now.”
Hasso co-founded the Construction Management Association of America’s New England chapter in 1995 and received CMAA’s first-ever Educator of the Year Award in 2012.