Why Engineers Need to Be in the Room Where Policy Gets Made

From Engineering Firm to City Hall to ASCE President

Marsha Anderson Bomar, Ph.D. has never followed a straight line. In this episode, she sits down with Michele to talk about starting her first company six weeks after having her third child, building a tech data collection firm before the internet existed, selling to a Fortune-listed company on her own terms, and eventually becoming the 8th woman president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. If you've ever thought your engineering degree locked you into one path, this conversation is for you.

Why Engineers Need to Be in the Room Where Policy Gets Made

Someone inside Marcia Geldert-Murphy, P.E.'s own political party told her to stop mentioning she was a civil engineer and that it had nothing to do with legislating. She stopped cold in her tracks.    In this episode, the former ASCE president and Illinois Senate candidate joins Michele to talk about why that moment perfectly illustrates the problem: the people who understand how infrastructure actually gets built aren't in the room when the money gets decided.    They cover the gap between input and output that lawmakers don't see, why we stopped thinking like an engineering-minded country, and what it's going to take to fix it before the next generation inherits a system that was already past its service life when we inherited it.

The Career Nobody Told You Was Possible

Jean Malafrante went to Mexico in college to build schools, and couldn't drink the water. That moment launched a 20+ year career in environmental engineering, a managing director role she never planned for, and eventually a consulting firm she built from a single contract in her first 60 days. She joins Michele to talk about asking for the work nobody else wanted, learning the business before she needed it, and why the engineers who will lead the next generation aren't the ones solving the technical problem; they're the ones who understand the people in the room.

Built to Fail: The Infrastructure Mistakes No One Talks About Until It's Too Late

Most people flip on a light switch or plug in their EV and never think twice about how that power got there. Dr. Richard Ezike has spent his career at the intersection of policy, technology, and workforce  across the Department of Energy, EPA, Department of Transportation, and Argonne National Laboratory and he's here to tell you everything that had to go right (and often goes very wrong) before that charger works. In this episode, Michele and Richard break down EV charging infrastructure from the ground up the three levels of charging, why half the stations you find on a map might be down, and what the federal government actually did to try to fix it. They get into cost overruns on major projects, how public utility commissions set your electric rates, who shows up to those meetings (and who doesn't), and what it costs communities when companies build at them instead of with them. Plus: what young engineers should be learning right now to stay employable in a shifting energy landscape and why hands-on training will never be replaced by a Zoom course.

Beyond the Grind: Rethinking Promotions, Feedback, and Culture in AEC

This episode features Heather Calvert, Chief Operating Officer at CORE, sharing how her firm intentionally centers people, equity, and psychological safety while still delivering complex projects on time and on budget. Heather walks through CORE’s journey from scrappy startup to “thirteen‑year‑old teenager” firm, including the painful inflection points of rapid COVID‑era growth and what they had to redesign to truly scale. She dives into their equity‑driven promotion and feedback systems, explaining how crowd‑sourced input and collaborative performance conversations help reduce bias and burnout.    Heather also unpacks the delivery pressures facing AEC firms today and why real‑time communication, trust‑building with clients, and developing engineers’ soft skills are just as critical as technical excellence. Throughout the conversation, she offers practical examples leaders can use to build cultures where people feel safe speaking up, learning from misalignment, and actually “living their core” at work.