By Robert L. Reid
Thomas W. Smith III, CAE, ENV SP, NAC, F.ASCE, the executive director of ASCE, is planning to retire by the end of the year after nearly three decades with the Society, including the past 11 years leading the staff.
Civil Engineering spoke with Smith, shortly after he announced his retirement plans, to take a look back at his career with ASCE as well as a look ahead at what he sees in the future for the Society, the civil engineering profession, and himself.
During the interview, Smith’s words had to compete with the sounds of thunder and heavy rain that fell outside the ASCE headquarters building in Reston, Virginia — an appropriate accompaniment since one of the topics he discussed was the challenge that extreme weather poses for civil engineers.
Smith recalls various extreme weather events as well as other disasters during his tenure at ASCE that demonstrated the vital role civil engineers play in society. He pointed to Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy; to Hurricane Milton, which forced ASCE to cancel the 2024 convention in Tampa, Florida; and to the 2016 earthquake in Alaska that disrupted an ASCE event in Anchorage.
There were blizzards in Texas that shut down the power grid and wildfires in Southern California that burned for weeks. The collapses of the Interstate-35 bridge in Minneapolis and the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, exposed weaknesses in the nation’s infrastructure, while the terror attacks on 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world.
Reaching out, pulling together
In all these events, whether natural or human caused, civil engineers worked to repair the damage, restore the communities, and help the public “pull together and get through it,” Smith says. And in the aftermath of such incidents, ASCE study teams worked to learn from those experiences and to incorporate the knowledge gained into new or existing standards “so we can figure out how to design going forward,” Smith explains.
He talked with pride about the work ASCE is doing with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and others to help account for climate change in future infrastructure design and construction and to advance infrastructure planning to support resilient communities. Through workshops and other efforts, ASCE is trying to better understand the data on rainfall, sea-level rise, temperatures, and other metrics to “protect the public for decades to come,” Smith notes.
In particular, the pandemic “taught us we can do things differently,” especially in terms of holding virtual meetings that do not require people to travel. That was an “eye-opening transformative change” for an organization with members in 177 countries, he explains, and it enabled ASCE to “involve and engage with far more people than (it) could before.”
Teamwork and media attention
It is the people of ASCE — the members, the volunteers, the staff — who instill Smith with “treasured memories” of what has been accomplished during his time as executive director as well as give him great hope for the future of the Society and the civil engineering profession.
Together, this team of engineers, experts, and dedicated individuals has worked toward passage of the “landmark, generational legislation” known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; contributed to the growing importance of ASCE’s Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (which this year recorded the highest overall grade ever for our nation); and developed the first-of-its-kind sustainability standard, ASCE/COS 73-23, Standard Practice for Sustainable Infrastructure, a performance-based measure that provides guidance for infrastructure owners to develop and implement sustainable solutions throughout a project’s entire life cycle.
Oh, and along the way, ASCE’s team also helped to produce two IMAX movies — Dream Big and Cities of the Future — and launched efforts such as Future World Vision and other far-reaching, future-focused measures.
Although disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and bridge collapses can focus the media’s attention on infrastructure issues, the release of a new report card or the IMAX films also increases the visibility of civil engineering and ASCE in more positive ways.
For Smith, one of the surprises he discovered as executive director was the multitude of media interviews he’s participated in, involving every major news outlet from ABC News and the Associated Press to The Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance. “I did not realize I would spend so much time doing (interviews),” he notes, adding that such experiences often came with little time to prepare and even when he was traveling or on vacation. One of his favorite media memories, though, was the time in August 2023 when CBS News Sunday Morning did a story about ASCE’s Opal Awards ceremony, which news anchor Jane Pauley described as the “Oscars of engineering.”
Pauley went on to say that civil engineers are “the largely unsung stars of some of our nation’s most important projects.” And while Smith realizes the importance of discussing damaged or failing infrastructure, “it’s also nice to talk about it when there’s not a crisis!”
Technological changes
Over his years at ASCE, Smith has witnessed tremendous growth in the use of technology, from a time before the Society had its own website to the digitization of its publications back to the 1800s, to new initiatives to prepare civil engineers for artificial intelligence. And with each technological development has come a greater capacity to serve ASCE’s membership, he stresses. “Cell phones, BlackBerries, smart phones — all of these have enabled global connectivity and represent a transformative change agent for an association like ASCE,” Smith recalls.
But even as new devices are adopted, some old attitudes remain a problem. Smith is especially concerned about what he calls the commoditization of civil engineering, in which the profession is “looked at as a low-bid, least-cost product. That is the antithesis of what this profession is about,” he counters. Instead, civil engineering “is a highly skilled, professional art and a science, a people-oriented profession.”
One solution he recommends is “to get people to think about life-cycle costs, not just upfront costs. If we could accomplish that, we would go a long way (toward) solving our commoditization concerns,” he predicts.
Likewise, Smith stresses the need for civil engineers to adopt a systems thinking approach. “To get engineers to look not just in their own silo but at the big picture and to communicate with other engineers and even non-engineers,” he explains, adding that such ideas are a key goal of ASCE2027, the Infrastructure and Engineering Experience, scheduled for Philadelphia in March 2027.
Looking ahead
A former ASCE student member himself, Smith points to the creation of three new endowments, exceeding $1.5 million, that “will support student members, younger members, and military engineering members for generations to come.” Student membership involvement, in particular, offers “the things you can take with you for the rest of your career,” he emphasizes, and helps create the “community, leadership, and ethics skills you will need to be a successful engineer.”
As for his own future, Smith says he has “a long list of personal and professional projects” he intends to start tackling. But he doubts he will fully retire anytime soon. Instead, he plans to remain active in ASCE as a volunteer. “I believe in this organization, which is why I’ve been dedicated to it for the past 30 years,” he explains. “I’ll just be involved in a different capacity.”
Wrapping up his thoughts, Smith describes working for ASCE as his “dream job” and the opportunity of a lifetime. “I have been able to work with engineers all over the world: brilliant people, incredibly conscientious, well-meaning, down-to-earth, salt-of-the-earth people!”
Stressing his gratitude for everyone who helped him throughout the years of changes, challenges, and achievements, Smith concludes by drawing on a line from the musical Wicked: So much of me is made from what I learned from you. He is forever thankful for the experiences he’s had at ASCE, with “the staff and volunteers and board members, and so many others. It’s been a privilege and an honor!”
Robert L. Reid is the senior editor and features manager of Civil Engineering.
This article first appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Civil Engineering as “Farewell to Tom Smith.”
