Designing structurally-sound bridges has been Anil K. Agrawal’s life’s work, for which he has won several awards. On May 1, he was honored not just for his research on the Throgs Neck or Tappan Zee–this time it was for the bridges he built with the next generation of engineers.
Agrawal, professor and chair of the civil engineering department at City College’s Grove School of Engineering, was the 2026 recipient of the George Winter Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). This recognition follows his winning of the society’s Moisseiff Award in 2025.
The ASCE, which represents over 160,000 members of the profession worldwide, has honored one candidate with the George Winter Award every year since 1990. The award, eponymously named after the late teacher and researcher, is given to a structural engineer whose work goes beyond the technical skills and exemplifies Winter’s humanistic approach to the field. Agrawal received a medal and honorarium at the ASCE’s annual Structure Congress Awards Luncheon.
The Moisseff Award, first established in 1947, is given to an important paper published in the ASCE’s online journal. Agrawal’s winning paper, “Reliability-Based Framework for Structural Robustness Evaluation of Bridges,” proposed a novel approach for assessing the safety of long-span bridges.
Since joining City College in 1998, Agrawal has spent the past three decades researching the effects of hazards such as earthquakes and massive collisions on bridges, as well as collaborating with students from the PhD level to high schoolers. “We as engineers tend to be very focused on engineering and not really see the humanistic side,” Agrawal said.
“I feel it’s very important as a professor, whether you are a teacher or engineer, getting involved and mentoring the younger ones about what is coming.”
His work with younger students began during the COVID-19 pandemic when Agrawal worked with his PhD students to teach online courses. For six months, while schools remained closed, they would give the students assignments and teach them how to use programming platforms like MATLAB. Since then, Agrawal has spoken with students from Brooklyn Technical High School on navigating prospective careers. In 2025, he helped organize the “Infrastructure Conference for High School Students,” where industry professionals discussed the future of structural engineering and the influence of artificial intelligence on the field.
“Research goes on but you can impact one student’s life and it goes many, many years,” Agrawal said. “You never know what that kid will do.”
In the same year he won the Moisseiff Award, Agrawal also received the society’s State-of-the-Art of Civil Engineering Award for his paper, “Concrete Bridge Barriers: State-of-the-Art and Design Implementation,” where he updated the guidelines for barrier designs to prevent calamity from large trucks.
“We have developed the computational framework where, without going to the field, we can simulate everything in the computer models and predict quite reliably what will happen to the truck,” Agrawal said.
Outside of the ASCE, Agrawal has received other accolades, including the 2022 Research Implementation Award from the New Jersey Department of Transportation for his manual on the usage of drones. He is currently working on a national version of this manual. Agrawal remains eager to continue his work with students and in research, most recently publishing an article that looked at the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
“I’ve done the same thing at City College for the last 20 years working in the same area. I’m still excited about the area. I’m not tired,” he said.
Yadira Gonzalez is a graduate of Baruch College where she studied journalism and minored in film. She was an editor-in-chief of Baruch’s award-winning magazine Dollars and Sense. Her writing has also been published in Documented, The New York Review of Books and AdAge.