Happy National Engineers Week! We’re celebrating our engineers by sharing a little bit about what they do. Check out how they describe their jobs in their own words, and what kind of innovative solutions they create.

We’re celebrating our structural engineers at DTC, like Corey Hollmann, who explained his job through metaphor, “Structural engineering is like putting on a heavy winter jacket and backpack full of bricks while standing in a pile of snow. The weight from the jacket and bricks rests on your shoulders, pushing down on your bones and into your feet, and finally into the snow. If the snow is soft you’ll sink. If your bones are weak your legs buckle. It would be easier if your bones were made of steel or big pieces of wood and you were standing on solid concrete.”

Additionally, we’re celebrating some of our engineers from our electrical and environmental departments tasked with a very specialized job — fitting solar photovoltaic (PV) panels onto buildings. PV designers Garrett Gobillot, Chris Grainger, and Mark Palucci figure out how to outfit and power buildings with solar panel systems, or in their own words, “We design the installation of commercial solar PV systems, while designing a way to safely and effectively interconnect it with the existing building’s electrical system, in accordance with the latest code requirements. Project locations range all across the country.”

Mechanical engineer Rebecca Ford says she likes to think of her job in terms of physical anatomy — if a building were a body, she would be responsible for designing and fixing its organs, “I’m in the MEP group, which stands for Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing. When I describe what I do for a job, I tell people that my group puts the ‘guts’ in the building: heating and cooling, ventilation, water, sanitary, lights and power.” Let an engineer in your life know that you appreciate what they do during National Engineers Week!

We can’t forget our civil engineers at DTC — Sean Laudati and Sonu Atluru design infrastructure that sustains communities across the Northeast, or as they explain it, “We’re part of the civil engineering group. The best way to describe what our group does is to say that we design everything but the building. Civil engineers maintain and upgrade existing infrastructure, and design new infrastructure that we depend on as citizens everyday. For example, we design roads, water supply, waste water networks, storm water networks and flood defenses.”

We’re spotlighting two of our traditional electrical engineers, Brian Poeltl and Wedney Morgan, both of whom play an integral part in our design process. Our electrical engineers ensure each system designed by our other engineers has access to the power necessary to run, or in their own words, “Electrical engineers play an important role in building design. From powering lighting fixtures and HVAC equipment, coordinating with the local utility companies, and laying out fire alarm devices, an electrical engineer has a role in every phase of building design.”