ASCE Metropolitan Section - President's Message

President's Message

Chase De Rose, Sr., M.ASCE
Photo: William Taylor

February is here and with it comes National Engineers Week. Held this year from February 18-26, the week offers opportunity for all of us in the industry to celebrate and promote engineering as a profession in schools across the country. There are numerous events taking place over this week and some of them are in schools near you. As your Met Section President, I’d like to encourage all of you to select and participate in at least one of these activities. And if you find that your local school is not holding an event, take it upon yourself to organize one. You'll be showing young people what engineering is about, and how engineers work to make the world a better place. Check out our Met Section website for more information on all the activities or for corporate sponsorships at the Met Section's annual National Engineers Week Kid's Day Event on February 20th, please contact Douglas Castelli at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

It was a true pleasure to be the featured speaker at our regional Future Cities Competition. The National Engineers Week Future City Competition is a program sponsored by the engineering community to promote technological literacy and engineering to middle school students. The Future City Competition fosters an interest in math, science, and engineering through hands-on, real world applications. The competition is open to all public, private, and parochial schools. Middle schools from New York City and Long Island compete in a regional competition. This year's New York City Regional Competition was held at SONY Wonder Technology Museum, in Manhattan on Saturday, January 14, 2012. The winning team advances to Washington, D.C., to compete against teams from across the country in the National Finals of the Future City Competition, a featured event during National Engineers Week. I want to personally thank Karen Armfield for chairing this event for the past 12 years and all the many helpers that make this a huge success.

Nominations are still being taken for the Met Section's 2012 Awards and Recognition Program. These annual local awards are presented to recognize local members for their contributions to the field of civil engineering. The awards are given out at the Annual Dinner Dance and Award Presentation. For more information on how to nominate a project or a person, please contact President-Elect Joe Englot at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Awards include:

Any ASCE member, regardless of grade, may make nominations, and individuals may be nominated for more than one award. Nominations must include the individual's resume (or supporting descriptive literature for a project), a rationale, and one page biography of 200 words or less. Submissions should be sent to the Chair of the Structures Group (for the Roebling Award and Homer Gage Balcom Award), the Chair of the Construction Group (for the Construction Achievement Award and Design/Build Award), and to the Chair of the Awards Committee (for all other awards). To be eligible, the award recipient must agree to accept the award in person at the Annual Dinner Dance and Awards Presentation, scheduled for Thursday, May 31, 2012 at Terrace on the Park in Queens.

ASCE offers scholarships and fellowships to engineering students who are ASCE members. Applications are accepted in the spring for the following semester. The Met Section's Scholarship Committee awards annual scholarships to active members of student chapters in the Met Section and children of Met Section members. The Lower Hudson Valley Branch also presents annual scholarships to high school seniors in Rockland or Westchester County who intend to pursue a college degree in civil engineering. More information on the Scholarship Luncheon will follow.

The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute has unanimously voted to establish a local chapter and our own Jagtar S. Khinda, Chair of the Met Section Infrastructure Group and President-Elect Joe Englot are officially the founding members and representatives of ASCE Met Section. This was done under the leadership of Sissy Nikolaou, Ph.D., P.E., Senior Partner and Head of Geo-Seismic Group at Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers. Sissy is also one of the founding members—and will be the Chair of the New York Chapter. She is helping Jagtar with our next seminar "Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of Structures"—to be held April 2 and 3, 2012 at NYU-Poly in Brooklyn, New York. Congratulations and thanks go out to our members who work tirelessly to bring the best for our Section.

The Met Section Leadership participated in a Professional Societies Day at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City for the U.S. Corps of Engineers. The goal was for employees to hear about what each Society offers and find out if any of these would fit their needs. Employees were able to sign up for the ASCE that day and received a 25 percent discount for participating in the event. Many thanks to Past President Tony Cioffi for doing the presentation and Younger Member Forum Member Sam Singer for helping me and Board Members Jagtar Kinda, Art Alzamora man the registration table.

We also had the honor of having lunch with National ASCE President Andy Herrmann and ASCE Executive Director Pat Natale on January 26th. The lunch was at Bobby Vans Grill with the current Met Section Leadership and a very nice time was had by all, many thanks to President Elect Joe Englot for putting together the program.

Sincerely,

Chase De Rose, Sr., M.ASCE
President, ASCE Met Section
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