David Thurston, Ph.D., PE, a senior technical director, will lead the company’s transit and rail design center in Pittsburgh and rail technical staff in North America. He has more than 35 years of experience in rail systems engineering and integration, and is active on numerous professional organization working groups and committees. Thurston is chairman of the North American Section of the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers (IRSE).
Dan Mesnick (second from top) joins Atkins as program director for asset management based in Edison, N.J. His 30 years of industry experience include expertise in rail and transit condition assessment, maintenance-of-way planning, operations and maintenance costing, and state of good repair program development. Mesnick has worked with more than 30 transit and commuter rail systems nationwide. He has served on TRB (Transportation Research Board) and AREMA (American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association) committees for railway design and maintenance.
Jonas Radstrom joins Atkins as national rail systems director in San Francisco, focused on major systems programs nationally and rail and transit project development in the Western U.S. He has more than 20 years of rail systems experience for clients such as Dallas Area Rapid Transit (*DART), Houston Metro, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Capital Metro), Caltrain, Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART), SoundTransit, and Charlotte Light Rail Transit.
Sergio Callen, a regional business development manager at Atkins in New York City, will lead Atkins’ systems engineering business throughout the Northeast. He brings more than a decade of experience in high speed rail, rapid transit and light rail systems, and in systems integration in consulting and design-build environments.
“We see rail as key to providing a better quality of life in U.S. cities over the coming decades. However, transit agencies have been challenged by a lack of skilled resources, specifically in rail specialties,” said Atkins CEO North America L. Joe Boyer. “Creating our new design center in Pittsburgh and hiring key staff in the Northeast and California are the first of many steps we are taking to deliver the world-class rail capability Atkins is known for to our North America clients.”
Atkins’ noted that its “1,500 rail systems engineers and experts have delivered $100 billion in capital projects for clients over the past decade, including many of the world’s top metro, commuter and high speed rail systems.”