CCE’s Top 10 Under 40: Giuseppe Gaspari

Photo courtesy AECOM.

This year, for the second time, Canadian Consulting Engineer launched an initiative to recognize up-and-coming consulting engineers across the country. We are now showcasing them on our website, in alphabetical order by surname.

Giuseppe Gaspari, 39, is a vice-president (VP) at AECOM, based in Toronto, and leads the firm’s tunnel practice for Canada, U.S. East and Latin America.

As a child growing up in Italy, he enjoyed digging tunnels in the sand at the beach. His studies at school, however, favoured poetry, Ancient Greek and Latin over math and sciences, until he decided he needed to catch up on lost time.

“I went into engineering because I wanted to make something very concrete, that people can see and touch,” says Gaspari. “I think that’s true of engineers in general. We all want to build something that can help communities thrive.”

After earning degrees in civil and geotechnical engineering at Sapienza University of Rome, he rose from a project engineer to a technical director for tunnels in Europe and Asia—including subways in Turkey, Singapore and India—before moving on to the Americas.

“When I came to Canada,” he says, “it was exciting both to learn local techniques and to share with others what I had experienced across the world.”

In Toronto, he worked for Geodata Engineering and Arup before joining AECOM in his current role in 2019.

“I hired him for AECOM because I was extremely impressed with his technical knowledge, enthusiasm for the profession, energy, and leadership capabilities,” says Nasri Munfah, now principal for Gall Zeidler Consultants.

The city also represented a place to settle down and raise a family, after many shorter stints abroad.

“I’ve stayed here the longest time because of Canada’s environment of opportunity for immigrants,” says Gaspari, “and because Toronto is currently where the biggest investments are being made into underground space use and tunnel projects.”

That said, his practice’s reach is vast, delivering projects from Ohio to Panama, from Vancouver to Montreal. So too is his voluntary outreach global in scope, through the International Tunnelling Association (ITA).

“In my view,” says ITA World Tunnel Congress president Arnold Dix, “he’d qualify as one of the Top 10 Under 40 for the world, too!”