Over more than 50 years in construction, Anthony F. Leketa points to several “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities. One involved leading a team of 750 from Parsons in rescuing the $2.3-billion project to design, build and operate a nuclear waste processing facility for the Dept. of Energy at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. The team completed 1 million hours of work without a lost-time incident and received recognition for its safety performance.

Now, already some years into retirement, Leketa finds himself leading a different type of team effort—enriching construction safety culture by encouraging new university-level safety coursework in engineering and construction programs. Specifically, Leketa is the 2024-25 chair of the National Academy of Construction’s Safety Committee, where years of work by leading safety advocates produced safety symposia at universities that have inspired educators. While Leketa guided development of an event at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, others carried the message to the University of Kansas, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin/Texas A&M and University of Colorado at Boulder.

Passion for Safety

Leketa’s passion for safety started during his 35-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which included overseeing contractor activities building a new Army base at Fort Drum and years in the Corps’ senior executive service. “I thought nothing could top my experience” in safety at the Corps, he says. But when he joined Parsons, the safety emphasis “was tremendous.” At senior executive program reviews, “If you couldn’t give the number of near misses in your group, CEO Chuck Harrington let you know you weren’t doing your job.”

The NAC safety committee was looking for an area where we “could make a difference,” says Ken Arnold, a past safety committee chair. Arnold and Wayne Crew, a past NAC executive director, realized a missing link was educating undergraduates on safety culture concepts. The outcome—the symposia series, attended by representatives from 45 universities and 90 industry companies—has produced results.

The events inspired Brian Kleiner, director of the Myers-Lawson School of Construction in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, to augment the existing safety courses so that students now can major in safety, he says. They will learn to deal with hazards and study the interaction of safety and technology, including using virtual reality to explore future hazards. Another beneficiary of a symposium was Samuel C. Lieber, associate professor and acting chair at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s School of Applied Engineering. He stepped up his school’s safety offerings last year, and they now include a minor in safety engineering and a course where students learn to take the inputs of hazard analysis plus safety requirements and “do iterative design and engineering work.”

The full report from the five symposia provided advice on creating curricula, where the subject of safety necessarily competes with other important engineering subjects for resources. The report helped Leketa and team develop their 2025 strategy for more programs—at Southern California, Oregon State, North Carolina State and Purdue—and a kickoff program Feb. 27 in Washington, D.C., hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Following long efforts from ASCE to change its recommended criteria for civil engineering education, ABET (formerly Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) changed its program criteria to read: “curriculum for civil engineers must include professional … attitudes and responsibilities of an engineer … including licensure and safety.”

The symposia and criteria change work together. “NAC is committed to safety culture,” Leketa says. “We believe in it!”