The American Concrete Institute (ACI) announces its 2021-2022 president, vice president, and four board members.

Cary S. Kopczynski has been elected to serve as president of the Institute for 2021-2022, Antonio Nanni has been elected ACI vice president for a two-year term, and Charles K. Nmai is now the Institute’s senior vice president. Additionally, four members have been elected to serve on the ACI Board of Direction, each for three-year terms: Michael C. Brown, Anthony R. DeCarlo Jr., John W. Gajda, and Kamal H. Khayat.

Cary S. Kopczynski, FACI, is CEO and Senior Principal of Cary Kopczynski & Company (CKC), an award-winning structural engineering firm with offices in Seattle, WA, and Chicago, IL, USA. CKC designs major urban buildings throughout the United States and beyond. The firm has won over 70 regional, national, and international awards and has been selected several times by Zweig White and Civil + Structural Engineer magazine as a top structural engineering firm to work for.

Kopczynski is a licensed civil and structural engineer in many states and a recognized expert in the design of reinforced concrete and post-tensioned concrete building structures.

Antonio Nanni, FACI, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA. He has been recognized by ACI for his many contributions with the 2021 Arthur J. Boase Award, 2018 Joe W. Kelly Award, 2006 Chapter Activities Award, and 1999 Delmar L. Bloem Distinguished Service Award.

Nanni’s research interests are in construction materials and their structural performance and field application, including monitoring and renewal with a focus on sustainability. He is currently Site-Director of the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for the Integration of Composites into Infrastructure (CICI). He is a licensed professional engineer in Italy and the states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Michael C. Brown, FACI, is a Senior Engineering Manager and Senior Technical Principal in the Herndon, VA, USA, office of WSP USA, Inc. He serves as the firm’s U.S. Bridge Asset Management Lead, a role in which he conducts condition evaluation and asset management of bridges and transportation structures, employing his broad knowledge of materials testing and nondestructive evaluation techniques; develops preventive maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation strategies; and coordinates structural load testing and in-place monitoring, including instrumentation and data analysis.

Brown has been an active member of ACI since 1997 and became a Fellow of the Institute in 2012. 

Since 1990, Brown has performed condition evaluation, corrosion evaluation and mitigation, maintenance, preservation, and rehabilitation of highway bridges, low- and mid-rise buildings, and parking structures. He began his career as a project engineer with a national consulting firm performing building condition assessment and structural, roofing, and dampproofing rehabilitation designs. Brown was Associate Director of Research within the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), where he worked for 15 years managing and conducting research, technical assistance projects, and technology transfer activities related to transportation structures, pavements, and geotechnical engineering in close collaboration with VDOT central office divisions and districts. Brown also served as a visiting faculty member and adjunct lecturer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, where he taught courses in structural design, materials, and construction and advised graduate research from 2003 to 2017.

Anthony R. DeCarlo Jr. is the Chief Operations Officer of TWC Concrete LLC, a turnkey concrete contractor in Cincinnati, OH, USA. TWC Concrete is a subsidiary of Baker Construction Enterprises.

DeCarlo has worked in the concrete industry for more than 25 years—from installing concrete in the field to managing multimillion dollar concrete projects and running a commercial/industrial concrete contracting company. TWC Concrete mainly performs work in the Midwest United States, east of the Mississippi River.

John W. Gajda, FACI, is a Principal and Co-Founder of MJ2 Consulting, PLLC, of Cedar Park, TX, USA. Gajda’s expertise is in the areas of mass concrete and thermal properties of concrete, crack investigation, and delayed ettringite formation. For more than 20 years, he has worked on mass concrete issues on approximately 1000 projects throughout the world. 

In 2008, he was named “Our country’s mass concrete expert” by Concrete Construction magazine. Gajda routinely gives presentations about mass concrete and has written many articles and publications on the topic, including the Portland Cement Association’s (PCA) Mass Concrete for Buildings and Bridges. Prior to his work with mass concrete, Gajda spent several years performing nondestructive testing of concrete structures throughout North America. He also performed research and development activities for PCA on insulated concrete form construction and environmental aspects of cement and concrete.

Gajda received his BS in ceramic engineering and his MS in material science engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA, and was part of the school’s concurrent degree program. He is a licensed professional engineer in 27 states and four Canadian provinces.

Kamal H. Khayat, FACI, is the Vernon and Maralee Jones Professor of Civil Engineering at Missouri S&T, Rolla, MO, USA. He is the Director of the Center for Infrastructure Engineering Studies at Missouri S&T and past Director of the Tier-1 University Transportation Center for Research on Concrete Applications for Sustainable Transportation (RE-CAST) and the National Center for Transportation Infrastructure and Safety. 

Khayat has conducted pioneering work in the field of rheology of cement-based materials and self-consolidating concrete. His other research interests include high-performance concrete, fiber-reinforced composites, infrastructure rehabilitation, underwater concrete, and grouting. He has authored and co-authored 460 technical papers and seven book chapters, edited and co-edited 16 books/proceedings, and was recently listed by Elsevier among the 150 most-cited people in civil engineering in the world.

To learn more, visit concrete.org.