Prior to joining HNTB, Gangrade served as a senior tunneling engineer at a global consulting firm, contributing to design and digital automation efforts for the $9.3 billion BART Silicon Valley Extension.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in your career?

Learning about digital technologies and their applications in civil engineering, and particularly in underground construction and tunneling. When I got into my doctorate program, I was not used to coding or scripting or understanding how digital deliverables or digital technologies actually work in civil engineering projects because I never came with that background. During my doctorate, I invested a lot of time into self growth and learning about things like automation. It was like learning a new language, I would say, inherently, trying to understand first set critical objectives.

What has been your favorite or most interesting project you’ve worked on and why?

My favorite is the BART Silicon Valley Phase II [Extension]. I worked on it for almost three and a half years. It's my favorite, because it involves construction of tunnel with a 53-ft dia.— approximately six stories high. With almost 55 ft excavation dia., it will be one of the largest metro tunnels in the world, when it goes into construction. Engineering wise, it just involves collaboration among multiple disciplines. I worked with electrical mechanical teams despite being a tunneling engineer, so that helped me learn a lot more about other disciplines on the project.

What’s the best career advice you’ve been given?

Ask questions and be a problem solver for people. Identify what challenges or engineering problems people are facing, and go ahead and ask them, “What are you looking for?” “How can I help you?” And I still practice it in my current professional setting. There are multiple teams that I work with, and I just reach out to them and I ask them, “How can our team help or support you to make this easier, make this efficient?” and “How can we improve our internal design processes.”

What’s your career advice for other young professionals in the industry?

Talk to as many people as you can. I mean, just network. Go ahead and try to explore what the industry is about and do what you can to stay relevant in the field. It's easy for us to put our head down, be within a cubicle and just work on the stuff in front of us. But go out there, network with people, try to understand what challenges people are trying to solve.

What’s the best part of your job?

The best part for me is trying to put out fires we experience due to a fast-paced schedule on projects. The core values of any engineering company are you need to finish things within budget and within time. It's easy to say, but how do we implement it? And how do we implement it without having a lot of confusion or conflicts between teams? And how do we implement it in the most efficient way? But that is the puzzle that I try to solve every single day at my work, and that excites me.