Rajat Gangrade: The geotechnical and tunneling engineer advances underground construction practices

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

What is a challenge you have overcome in your career?

Know digital technologies and their applications in civil engineering, and in particular in underground construction and tunnels. When I entered my PhD program, I wasn’t used to coding or scripting or understanding how digital deliverables or digital technologies actually work in civil engineering projects because I never came in with that background. During my PhD, I invested a lot of time in personal growth and learning about things like automation. It was like learning a new language, I would say, inherently, trying to understand the critical objectives set first.

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

My favorite is the BART Silicon Valley Phase II [Extension]. I worked there for almost three and a half years. It’s my favorite, because it involves building a tunnel with a diameter of 53 feet, about six stories. With an excavation diameter of nearly 55 feet, it will be one of the largest subway tunnels in the world when it goes into construction. As for engineering, it just involves collaboration between multiple disciplines. I worked with electromechanical equipment despite being a tunnel engineer, so it helped me learn a lot more about other project disciplines.

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

Ask questions and be a problem solver for people. Identify what engineering challenges or 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 environment. There are several teams that I work with, and I just reach out to them and ask, “How can our team help or support you to make this easier and more efficient?” and “How we can improve our internal design processes.”

What is 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 all about and do your best to stay relevant in the field. It’s easy for us to put our heads down, be in a cubicle and just work with the things in front of us. But get out there, connect with people, try to understand what challenges people are trying to solve.

What is the best part of your job?

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