Congratulations to Kerrie!
Kerrie Greenfelder, PE, BCEE is the Municipal Water Department Engineering Manager for Burns & McDonnell in Kansas City. She has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with an Environmental Emphasis from the University of Kansas.
Kerrie is active in a variety of professional engineering organizations, including the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), Kansas Society of Professional Engineers (KSPE), and the Water Environment Federation (WEF).
Here are some things her nominator shared about her:
The Society of Women Engineers selected Kerrie for the 2015 Emerging Leader award honoring individuals who have been actively engaged in the engineering profession and have demonstrated outstanding technical excellence while producing significant accomplishments.
Upon learning of her award, Ron Coker, Senior Vice President, Burns & McDonnell, had this to say about her:
“Kerrie offers extreme value to our clients, because she not only has experience on an exceptionally broad range of water projects, but she has also taken on some very specialized initiatives. For instance, Kerrie has worked with tribes in the Southwest on some innovative projects that provided access to safe and clean drinking water for their communities.”
Kerrie was the manager for the Pojoaque Basin Regional Water System Treatment Plant Pilot Study Project for the Bureau of Reclamation in New Mexico. Part of the $81 million Aamodt Litigation Settlement Act, it defined the water treatment parameters to provide drinking water to four Native American Pueblos. Kerrie was hand-selected for this role due to her communication abilities, as this project entailed numerous and diverse stakeholders posing unique cultural parameters as part of the litigation settlement. Her current portfolio of projects reveals the level of trust Burns & McDonnell places in Kerrie to lead complex projects, and reflects her technical competence and commitment to socially responsible engineering practices.
As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Kerrie has watched the numbers of women in engineering stall, even decline, during her 18-year career. Through her involvement with the Society of Women Engineers and the WEF Water Leadership Institute, Kerrie continually better prepares herself for the challenges the industry is facing – aging infrastructure, retiring workforce, financial constraints, increasingly stringent regulations – by learning innovative techniques, procedures, and solutions to these challenges through each organization’s training, networking, and educational opportunities.
Kerrie ALWAYS makes it a point to share the information she’s learned with others to help put into practice her new and/or improved skills. Her passion for teaching the next generation(s) via STEM outreach will leave a legacy well into the future.
In 2009, Kerrie conceived and developed the “SWEeter Futures Outreach Program” with the SWE Sonora Region Governor Jennifer Harris, and spearheaded its successful implementation throughout the region. After exceeding its first-year goal of reaching 2000 K-12 students by a factor of 3, it grew under Kerrie’s leadership to meeting the ambitious fourth-year goal of reaching 25,000 students. SWE adopted this grassroots program at the national level in 2011.
While many engineers want to be the best in their specific field, Kerrie genuinely enjoys “knowing a little about a lot,” be that water, wastewater, water reclamation, or many other engineering topics! This optimistic attitude and breadth of knowledge has served her very well throughout her career. Kerrie can ably guide clients toward a successful project solution, regardless of the service area.
To learn more about Kerrie and Burns & McDonnell, click here.
The Wonder Women of Water is a recognition initiative focused on the contributions made by women to the water and wastewater industry.
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