New Weidlinger president calculates firm's strengths.

When Raymond Daddazio first took up work in the applied sciences in the mid-1970s, his motivation was simple.

"I was doing thesis work at Columbia and I spoke with my advisor and told him I didn't want to starve anymore."

Thirty years later, Daddazio's simple decision has led him into a rather complex position: president and CEO of an international consulting engineering firm with projects around the globe ranging wildly in scale and in subject, from bridge design, to meeting military hardware design needs, to mapping sustainable building design. Daddazio has been on the job as president at Weidlinger since the first of the year, rising to the post after a decade serving as head of the company's applied science division. So far, Daddazio said, it's been an interesting ride.

"My first five months have been interesting," he said. "There's always your expectations of what a job is and then the realities ... But the plan is the same. We can take a good firm and make it better." The key to strengthening Weidlinger, Daddazio said, is playing upon the fact that the firm in far from boutique firm. Weidlinger has four main divisions, each complex in its own right. The Structures Division engineers anything from skyscrapers, to airports to museums. The Transportation engineers know bridges, tunnels, highways and track. The Applied Science Division looks to make military devices more potent and to make civilian buildings more resilient in attack. The Construction Services Division can help keep costs down through value engineering.

"We're known for our military work, but we did $52 in building last year. The key is being multidisciplinary," Daddazio said. "The idea is the customer gets solutions based on Weidlinger's entire expertise rather than thinking of them all as separate lines of business."

For an example, Daddazio pointed out that in the wake of September 11 and terrorist attacks such as the transit bombings in London and Madrid, protective design has become incredibly important. But without the vast budgets of the military or other government agencies behind them,

Daddazio says developers need to consider both safety and the bottom line.

"It's a situation where you need a firm that not only knows about building engineering, but one that knows about local codes and one that can value engineer a solution that is as safe as possible while spending money wisely," Daddazio said.

The memory of a structure's engineering specifications and the potential for disaster are always close at hand for Daddazio. The native New Yorker's office is where it was in 2001: a mile from Ground Zero. For the next several months, those events would dominate work at Weidlinger, as a large portion of their work force (all spared in the attack despite frequent meetings in the building), at the request of government agencies, took to the grim task of forensically engineering exactly what went wrong at the trade center and why the buildings fell. While the task of literally and accurately recreating the events of that day in countless computer simulations may sound morbid, Daddazio said the work had an energized many at Weidlinger and made all understand the importance of the work they do.

"It showed us the true meaning of the work we were doing," he said. "We realized that aside from the daily grind the decisions we make can make people safe or hurt them."

Though protective design has been an important part of the firm's work since even before 9/11, Daddazio is excited about the company reaching out in other fields, such as high-rise construction and sustainable design. Currently, his favorite Weidlinger project is a The TEDA International Convention Center Hotel in Tianjin, China. According to a Weidlinger statement, the 55-story structure is, " shaped like the intertwined trunks of ancient cypress trees," with "its rotated plan consists of three cylinders of varying diameters offset two degrees per floor."

Despite his lengthy background in esoteric science topics such as low frequency structural acoustics and extreme loading responses and nonlinear structural analysis, Daddazio is able to offer a somewhat simpler description of TEDA.

"I like it. It never looks the same from two places at once," he said.