Charles Winter

Background

About Charles Winter

I’m a professional engineer, an amateur writer, and continually evolving human being. I’ve spent the last 25 years employed as a geotechnical engineer, where I had the privilege of helping design and construct highway bridges, commercial high-rises, industrial facilities, tunnels, retaining structures, and engineered slopes among other things. On the technical side, I take pride in developing innovative methods to optimize foundations, whether it be shallow, mat, or deep foundations (driven pile and drilled shafts are my favorite!). I have written countless reports, but really enjoy my current position where I’m fully immersed in design teams, involved from project inception through exploration, design, specification writing, project award and construction oversight. While I enjoy the technical challenges, I’m becoming ensconced in improving my “soft skills”, namely interpersonal and group communication, to help improve communication of geotechnical risk and cost to other design disciplines and project stakeholders. Not fully involving the geotechnical engineer throughout the process results in higher cost and increased risk. Bad for business, bad for our ailing infrastructure – a mantra that needs to be repeated and repeated.