Jacobs Associates Honors Two Employees with the James Wilton Award

The principals at Jacobs Associates announced that Joel Kantola, PE, a senior associate in the Boston office, and the late Bhaskar Thapa, PhD, PE, who was a lead associate in the Walnut Creek office, are the 2013 recipients of the James Wilton Award. This is an employee award that honors the memory of James Wilton, former principal and president of Jacobs Associates. Jacobs Associates principals presented the James Wilton Awards on Oct. 25 at the 2013 management meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The award recognizes the accomplishments and contributions made by Jacobs Associates employees. It provides an opportunity to acknowledge their innovations, implemented into either a Jacobs Associates project or our business operations and demonstrating an individual’s commitment to quality and excellence at the firm. A person receiving this award shares the traits that made James Wilton an “engineer’s engineer”—innovative, hardworking, practical, and meticulous.

Kantola has over 20 years of civil engineering experience in design, analysis, claims and construction. As part of the DC Clean Rivers Project he has been a project manager on the Anacostia River Tunnel and assistant project manager on the Blue Plains Tunnel, and presently is working on the 2,700‐ft‐long First Street Tunnel. He holds an MS in Geotechnical/Offshore Engineering and a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of New Hampshire.

Thapa had over 14 years of experience in the design and construction of underground structures. He was an expert in the New Austrian Tunneling Method (NATM), and was the lead tunnel designer and the design representative during construction on the Caldecott Improvement Project. Thapa held a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and MS and BS degrees in Civil Engineering from Carnegie‐Mellon University. He passed away unexpectedly on June 19, 2013.