Top This! Alumnus Vatsal Shah is "Young Engineer of the Year" for 2019
Vatsal Shah '08H, M.S. '09, Ph.D. '14, a civil engineer with Mott MacDonald who oversees the design and construction of foundations – for wind and solar farms, wastewater treatment plants, tunnels and bridges, among others – in starkly diverse landscapes from the East Coast to Texas, is the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) “Young Engineer of the Year” for 2019.
The award recognizes “outstanding contributions” to both the profession and the community. Shah’s swift rise in the field is best characterized by the distinctive energy mix that has fueled it: a scholar’s interest in rethinking problems, the pursuit of new and emerging engineering projects and the drive to put in 18-hour days when needed.
At the age of 23, he became one of the youngest licensed professional engineers in the state, and by 29 was president of NSPE’s New Jersey chapter. Before he turned 30, he established a geotechnical practice in Mott MacDonald’s environmental division, and now manages all of its projects in the Northeastern and Central United States. Since earning his Ph.D. five years ago, he has taught night courses at NJIT and now also NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, where, as “Dr. V”, he is a model of plucky ambition and can-do follow-through to his students. He dedicates his NJIT salary to two scholarships he’s endowed in his parents’ name, one to the civil engineering department and another to the Albert Dorman Honors College. He's an officer of the NJIT Alumni Association.
At Mott MacDonald, Shah continues to build the firm’s soils and foundations portfolio, which includes traditional infrastructure such as water treatment facilities, flood walls, and roadways, to an expanding array of energy infrastructure for the oil and gas industry, as well as renewables. He got his start in the energy arena in 2009 during the natural gas boom in the Marcellus Shale in Western Pennsylvania.
“Pumps and wells need foundation design work. In the beginning when we were creating the geotechnical group, I commuted four and half hours each way every day to Pittsburgh to oversee excavations and do the necessary engineering analysis for big well pads,” he recounts. “Imagine designing water wells and treatment systems for upwards of 700 gallons per minute in the middle of remote Pennsylvania on a hillside prone to landslides—you’re dealing with very complex terrain and a variety of challenges.”
The rise of large-scale renewable energy installations has changed the landscape considerably over the past decade and his portfolio has changed with it. Shah is now overseeing preliminary planning and design for the proposed Roaring Brook Wind Power Project in Martinsburg, N.Y., a 39-turbine, nearly 80-megawatt (MW) facility that sprawls over 5,000 acres with five miles of buried electrical wire and three overhead.
“We had to investigate the ground which would support the turbines in the dead of winter—trying to get sampling equipment three-miles down a snow-covered road with temperatures below zero. As harsh as the conditions were during the few months of our investigation and design work, the foundations we design have to withstand those conditions for decades to follow,” he notes.
A 101 MW solar installation near Nevada’s Battle Mountain, part of the largest clean energy project in the state’s history, presents an entirely different set of engineering challenges. “We need to make sure that there’s sufficient support from the soil in the drier, hotter areas of the country. We need to make sure the panels won’t lift up like giant sails when it’s windy, or worse, crack and stop producing power.”
There is yet another element to Shah’s success. He’s unflappable.
In pursuit of a job following graduation, he arrived at the career fair on campus with an unusual handicap: an arduous dental procedure the day before left him unable to speak. Undaunted, he circulated with his resume and a paper that said, “Just had all four wisdom teeth removed—can’t talk now, but would love to talk next week. Please call me!”
His quick pivot on Day 1 of his first job at then-Hatch Mott MacDonald is another case in point. Upon learning to his disappointment that the firm no longer had a foundations sub-practice, Shah threw himself into the next best thing: landfill engineering.
“I’m interested in soils and that’s where the work was,” he recalls, noting, “while we make concrete and steel, we know how these materials behave. But we have to calibrate the properties of soils on the spot, with no data upfront, essentially for every new job. To me this is engineers’ engineering.”
He took a multi-pronged approach to the field from the outset. While working and earning a Ph.D. in geotechnical engineering, he spent evenings in a self-funded laboratory in a rented suburban garage studying how landfills settle as their waste decomposes and the rate at which they emit methane.
“With so many sealed – and, in effect, abandoned – landfills dotting the landscape in New Jersey and New York, it became economically viable to reuse these vast open spaces. Because waste streams are heterogeneous, however, it’s difficult to generalize about how quickly they will settle and when they’re viable to be used as an alternate source of energy (landfill gas-to-energy) or as real estate,” he notes. “The decomposition process hinges on what’s thrown away and that differs from region to region. New Jersey’s waste is different from California’s, for example. We throw a lot more away here, including food, and that produces more gas rapidly, which affects the way the landfill decomposes, emits methane and ultimately settles.”
During the early part of his career, he followed trash trucks by day on their routes to count the number of cans they collected and to evaluate what was in them. “We would go to the landfill and sort through 500-pound samples,” he recounted. “It was obviously not a glamorous job, but there was hard science and engineering behind it. We used that information to create a new recycling facility.”
Four years later, he proposed adding a foundations sub-practice to Nick DeNichilo ’73, M.S. '78, president and CEO of Mott MacDonald North America. The response was: “Go get it.”
“At that point, we were subcontracting for all of our foundation work, so I started cold-calling managers at the firm telling them that I had the experience and thought we could do it in-house. Obviously, most people are wary of a young engineer—but they saw I had backing and support and that made it much easier. We gained credibility with our thoughtful design process – and by involving them in it.”
That same year, the American Society of Civil Engineers named him the 2013 “New Face of Civil Engineering” for his professional work and humanitarian efforts in solving water treatment problems in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the 2010 earthquakes.
“You can’t often see the foundations or support systems we design since they’re below the ground, but none of the every-day activities we do, from flipping a light switch to opening a water tap, could be built without them,” he notes.
Shah incorporates his experiences on the ground in his classes to help students understand the practical applications of their course work. Indeed, he credits much of his professional success to NJIT’s engineering curriculum, which embraced this philosophy.
“Many of my professors were industry practitioners who taught us not just ‘theory,’ but how to think like an engineer,” he notes.