On the surface, Black & Veatch engineer Ashley Galagusz has a very subterranean life as an award-winning tunneller. But dig a bit deeper, and you’ll find the Canadian’s fervor for rock climbing is a fitting metaphor for her zeal in helping other women ascend in her ranks. 

At 34, the member of the Underground Construction Association’s Women in Tunneling group has supervised and recruited women engineers to Black & Veatch, helping feed the employee-owned company’s pipeline of smart minds. She’s mentored female engineering students in the University of Toronto’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program. 

Galagusz always has been driven by the core belief that “engineering teams perform better when the team is diverse, and some of the most brilliant engineers I work with are women.”  

Suffice it to say, it hasn’t been the journey she could have imagined. Fresh out of college with a civil engineering degree, Galagusz chased soil remediation and other environmental engineering gigs but found them frustratingly elusive. She broadened her search and happened upon a job listing for a “tunnel engineer-in-training,” then chased it out of curiosity.

“I had no idea what tunneling entailed,” she recalls of being inspired by the listing’s search for someone with chops in geotechnical and structural engineering — two courses she’d taken and enjoyed at McGill University in her native Montreal.

Of course, she got the job. A dozen years later and newly minted as the top young tunneller for 2024 by a Canadian trade group, the tunnel practice lead in northern California and the Pacific Northwest for Black & Veatch considers it nothing short of lifechanging.

“Tunneling is a niche industry, but I absolutely love it,” said Galagusz, now based in Vancouver and recently profiled in the Kansas City Business Journal for February’s “engineers week.” “Most people don’t know those tunnels are there, providing essential services like water, wastewater and power. There’s something so exhilarating about walking into a tunnel under construction and knowing that nobody above ground has any idea what’s going on beneath the surface.”

Call it tunnel vision about engineering that swept over her since her dad – a structural engineer – steered her into her eventual career path late in her high school years, given her knack for math and science. Galagusz dove into civil engineering, enamored by “the idea of working on projects that could benefit the environment and society.”

Her work has included designing underground structures for one of the largest wastewater pumping stations in North America – a billion-dollar Canadian project. She also proved instrumental in designing the new tunnels beneath Lake Ontario for what will be North America’s first grid-scale small nuclear modular reactor.

All of it helps explain why last October she took home the top young tunneller award from the Tunneling Association of Canada, bestowed to someone 35 or younger who’s made an outstanding contribution to that country’s tunneling and underground infrastructure projects.

"Ashley’s success is a testament to her passion for engineering, mentoring others and achieving successful project outcomes,” said Dan Cressman, her Black & Veatch supervisor. “The example Ashley has set in this regard has helped foster development of talent at Black & Veatch and position us as a leader in the execution of complex underground projects."

Galagusz takes stock in how far she’s come since her first job in her hometown’s big-box convenience store, where she worked the cash register, filled balloon orders, restocked shelves and learned something priceless that’s still applicable today — “that no task is too small to not do it well.” “There’s integrity in doing good quality work, even if it’s just placing a price sticker on a $1 item,” she said.