Civil engineer. AI infra builder. Ran out of patience for PDFs.
Civil engineer with 21 years across design, construction, and quality assurance on heavy civil infrastructure. Primary QA/QC leadership and concrete specification ownership for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago's capital improvement program across its scaling from $339M in 2018 to $855M in 2026 — more than 2.5× growth in eight years, with sharp acceleration after 2022 as major capital projects (including the $368M O'Brien WRP secondary treatment battery) entered active construction. Run the four-person in-house QA/QC section with specialty consultants, covering metals, concrete, protective coatings, and soils. Track record of modernizing long-stagnant programs: first MWRD concrete specification rewrite since 2002, in-house materials lab pointed at AMRL/AASHTO accreditation, elimination of a decades-old agency radioactive-materials license, single-handed launch of the UAS/drone program, and a multi-LLM adversarial review pipeline currently being built for submittal review. Licensed Professional Engineer in Illinois and California; AMPP Senior Coatings Inspector, AMPP Protective Coatings Specialist, and AWS Certified Welding Inspector. Open to relocation or remote work.
MWRD Capital Improvement Program appropriations — scaled from $339M in 2018 to $855M in 2026 (more than 2.5× growth, with sharp acceleration after 2022). Figures from official MWRD Budget in Brief / adopted budget documents, publicly available at mwrd.org:
Preliminary 2025 internal productivity benchmark (pre-AI, submittal reviews only): two-person QA/QC review team delivered roughly 5× per-capita submittal throughput vs. peer internal review functions — likely a conservative figure. Submittals reviewed by QA/QC were materially more technical in content.
Lead the Quality Control section. Inspection and testing support for field crews across metals, concrete, protective coatings, and soils. Responsible for specification development covering protective coatings, concrete, and quality control on all MWRD construction contracts. Manage consultant contracts and procurement for concrete, protective coatings, welding, and geotechnical specialty services. Review contract documents prior to public advertisement.
Field engineering on major MWRD capital improvement contracts. See Selected Projects.
Hydraulic and structural design on MWRD's deep-tunnel system. See Selected Projects.
Inspection oversight for heavy civil and transportation projects. Coordinated QA/QC inspections for 400+ of 616 prestressed, post-tensioned bulb tee beams produced for the Des Plaines River Valley Bridge.
Site civil design for residential, commercial, industrial, and roadway projects. Cost estimates, permit applications, earthwork, grading, utilities, specifications. Designed storm/sanitary sewer and water main improvements; sized detention and compensatory storage. Projects included Cherry Hill Business Park, Joliet Crossings, Des Plaines Mannheim Retail, Ironworkers Union Facility, and the Village of Inverness Pavement Maintenance Program.
Inspected contractor and subcontractor work on urban transportation projects. Chicago Skyway 106th Street Viaduct EB Reconstruction; Western Avenue resurfacing (Addison–Howard); Ashland Avenue resurfacing (39th–95th).
Supported research on CFRP rehabilitation of bridge girders and latex-modified concrete for bridge deck overlays. Built and tested specimens; assisted PhD and graduate students.
Design and construction of ~14,470 LF of 15-ft ID lined tunnel with connection to an existing TARP stub; six lined drop shafts (7–20 ft dia., 227–250 ft deep), vent shaft, six connecting structures, three backflow gate structures, entrance conduit structures, manholes, gate replacements, and louver additions at 25 existing MWRD drop shafts.
MWRD Contract 11-054-3P. Associate Civil Engineer, Sept 2013 – Dec 2017. 450 MGD, 896-lamp low-pressure high-output UV system — largest wastewater UV installation in the world; serves 1.3M people across 143 sq mi. Acted as assistant Resident Engineer: directed daily field activities, scheduled field inspectors, and personally conducted QA/QC inspections. Following the May 17, 2015 failure of the open-cut support-of-excavation system — which compromised the CTA Yellow Line embankment and suspended Yellow Line service for five months — led the forensic retrieval of the failed structural steel retention system; coordinated with Walsh Construction, CTA, and investigators on recovery sequencing, evidence preservation, and safe re-excavation. Facility commissioned Spring 2016; received 2017 ACEC-Illinois Honor Award.
~5,700 LF of 20-ft dia. concrete-lined tunnel connecting the Des Plaines Tunnel System to McCook Reservoir. Gate shaft with primary and backup gates, gate control building, temporary access shaft, portal, high-wall stabilization, energy-dissipation apron with baffle blocks, demolition of existing tunnel plug, live connection to the operating Des Plaines system.
Resident Engineer for ~2,300 LF of soil nail retaining wall along the western and southern sides, plus perimeter slope stabilization.
20-ft dia. concrete-lined connection tunnel from the Diversion Tunnel to Thornton Composite Reservoir. Drop shaft, deaeration chamber, portal, high-wall stabilization, energy-dissipation apron, and two reinforced-concrete tunnel plugs.
Resident Engineer for barge-delivered installation of 1,300 LF of sheet pile wall, articulated concrete block mat, rip rap, and backfill. Giken hydraulic pile-jacking machine used for sheet pile installation.
Managed development of updated computer models to simulate rainfall events, optimize operations, identify constraints, recommend physical improvements, and run storm-scenario analyses across local sewers, intercepting sewers, and the deep-tunnel system.
Illinois State Toll Highway Authority. Field Inspector for a 1.3-mile spliced bulb tee bridge — Illinois's first post-tensioned spliced bulb-tee girder bridge and the 2nd-longest bridge in the state. 34 piers, 616 beams: 90-in prestressed girders on simple spans up to 170 ft, 102-in post-tensioned spliced segmental girders on 216-ft spans, 120-in haunched pier segments with 102-in drop-ins on 270-ft main spans. Among the largest post-tensioned precast beams in the U.S. by length and weight (up to 256,000 lb). Coordinated precast yard QA/QC for prestressed, post-tensioned concrete beams. Crossing spans two roadways, two railroads, a river, two canals, and wetlands with endangered species.
ACEC-Indiana Engineering Excellence “Honor” Award (2009), via Janssen & Spaans Engineering. Featured in ASPIRE Magazine, Spring 2008.
Field Inspector for replacement of a 3-span reinforced filled spandrel arch with a 3-span variable-depth continuous CIP post-tensioned slab; micropiles, post-tensioned piers and deck, architecturally enhanced walls with form liners.
Field Inspector for a 168-ft 2-lane highway bridge with single pier, two spans, and integral abutments; earth excavation for New Stearns Road under Route 31.
Field Inspector for historic custom lighting, vaulted sidewalk reconstruction, scored and colored sidewalks, underground electrical duct banks, utility adjustments, streetscape features, CTA "L" structure cleaning and painting, roadway resurfacing.
M.S., Construction Engineering & Management — University of Illinois at Chicago. Degree conferral expected May 2026.
Doctoral studies (planned) — continuing at UIC; approximately one semester of coursework remaining before transitioning to research. Research phase structured to support remote execution.
B.S., Civil and Materials Engineering — University of Illinois at Chicago, 2004.
Engineering & construction
eBuilder · Trimble · Omnant · AutoCAD · MicroStation · Constructware
Hydraulic & hydrologic modeling
Hydraflow · SWMM · HY-8 · HEC-RAS · TR-20 · Paydirt
Data science & machine learning (UIC CME 594)
Python (Spyder, scikit-learn) · supervised learning (logistic regression, SVM, decision trees, random forest, gradient boosting) · neural networks (MLP, CNN, LSTM) · unsupervised (K-means, PCA, feature selection) · NLP (TF-IDF, LDA, NMF) · Gaussian processes · SHAP interpretability · cross-validation and ROC/AUC evaluation
Frontier LLMs for engineering review
Claude · ChatGPT · Gemini · Grok · Perplexity — applied to multi-platform adversarial document review
Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America — March 1999
This page's companion image, meadow.png, contains a
password-protected LSB-steganographic payload: this same résumé (as a .docx)
plus a short letter, encoded into the pixel data, encrypted with SHA-256
keystream XOR, password f'c=RainbowPoop.
Extract it with the decoder: decode.py — run
python decode.py meadow.png "f'c=RainbowPoop". Pillow and numpy required.
