Each year, the arrival of autumn signals the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. Celebrated between September 15 and October 15, this month provides a valuable opportunity to recognize the rich culture and contributions of the Hispanic and Latino communities.
Timmons Group also notoriously celebrates Geotechtober during October, a month dedicated to a deep dive into the work and lives of our geotechnical engineers. A unique opportunity arose this year when I reached out to Juan Carlos Losa-Solano (likes to go by Carlos) for a Hispanic Heritage Month employee feature — It wasn’t until I had the interview booked with Carlos that I learned he is also on our Richmond geotechnical and constructions services team!
Carlos is a geotechnical engineer in our field operations division. His six years of experience performing geotechnical and geological engineering tasks include field investigations, logging soil and rock samples, managing geotechnical in-situ testing, coordinating laboratory testing, evaluating project sites, performing engineering analyses, and providing geotechnical engineering reports for clients. Carlos has worked on a plethora of projects in markets like recreation and sports, transportation, solar and renewables, multi-family housing, commercial, and residential.
Carlos came to Timmons Group in March 2020, just as awareness of the Covid-19 pandemic was on the rise. While many projects were on hold due to a lack of resources, Carlos’ work ramped up because the construction projects that were already underway still required geotechnical engineering services and third-party resources like CMT (construction materials testing).
“The industry is interesting because we get to see projects through from the ground-up, and a lot of my department’s projects had just started up when I came to Timmons,” Carlos said. “We will perform a reconnaissance to evaluate site access, and we’ll visit again to conduct borings, then provide our Geotech report. Then CMT will follow up on implementation for the proposed construction and see the project through.”
Carlos says his favorite kind of projects are the ones that require a set of different engineering solutions. “A site might have unsuitable soils, which I’ve dealt with before, but then I’ll discover that’s in conjunction with another issue that I haven’t dealt with before. I love working to find new combinations of solutions.”
“I enjoyed learning about the discipline in itself,” Carlos said about his geotechnical engineering studies in school. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he graduated with a civil engineering degree. “There were just more things that stuck out to me in my geotechnical engineering classes than in the other disciplines. I liked structural and environmental, but there’s just something about learning how the earth provides the support for everything else that really caught my attention.”
Another part of school that Carlos gravitated towards was cultural experiences with other Hispanic students. Carlos said, “I grew up in Hickory, North Carolina, which at the time was predominately Caucasian. We didn’t have too much Mexican cultural influence in our household. So, when I got to college, I sought out those experiences with other Latin students.” Carlos was involved with Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and other groups in school where he re-discovered a love for Mexican cuisine, music, dancing, and culture alongside peers in his program.
These experiences, Carlos says, were a pinnacle for how his pride grew as a Mexican American in the engineering field. “I want to be proud of my culture and I want to share that culture with other people,” he added.
Adamant about creating a robust cultural life at home with his wife and two daughters (one and four years old), Carlos and his family cook together often and celebrate heritage holidays like Mexican, Salvadoran, and Paraguayan Independence Days. In light of Hispanic Awareness month and October, Carlos and his family look forward to celebrating Dia de Los Muertos, or “Day of the Dead”, where he and his family throw a party to celebrate the lives of family and friends that have passed away. They commemorate their loved ones by placing pictures on their ofrenda (“altar” in Spanish) and placing food and a drink beside a person’s picture, as an offering to their loved one.
Carlos is also embracing his Mexican culture with tattoos that represent his family and heritage, including a clock that reads the time for his first daughter’s birthday, an Aztec-inspired sleeve on his right arm, his family’s surname, and a portrait of him and his wife on their wedding day, which he says is the best day of his life.
Carlos is growing in his engineering expertise every day and says that he looks forward to continuing to ‘put his brain to work.’ Among his current projects are residential single-family townhomes, an apartment development, a visitor center for private developers, a stormwater line for a local municipality, and a juvenile detention center.
His role as a geotechnical engineer provides unique experiences like working on sites with archeologists to make sure any uncovered historical artifacts are properly taken care of and sampling soil for analysis to ensure subsurface soils are suitable for the proposed site development. He has found joy in a career where every day is different with new challenges and includes the understanding of soil mechanics in support to engineering practice. But, funnily enough, Carlos has environmental allergies, which sometimes include sneezing fits while performing his day-to-day tasks like classifying soils.
Interested in learning more about open roles with our geotechnical engineering team? Search for your next job opportunity at www.timmons.com/careers.
