Robert G. Card

Robert G. Card - President and Chief Executive Officer, SNC-Lavalin Group

Robert Gordon Card (born February 1953) was the CEO of SNC-Lavalin,^[1] Canada’s largest engineering and construction firm, with over 40,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenues, and the builder of many iconic projects worldwide.

Career

Card joined Montreal, Canada-based SNC-Lavalin in 2012 to lead a recovery effort after the firm identified and reported ethics issues from the previous decade. Card initiated a complete revamp of the firm’s governance, ethics and compliance program and transformed initiatives in health and safety, environment, sustainability and other aspects of corporate social responsibility. He also developed a strategy to maintain the firm’s position at the top of the rapidly consolidating engineering and construction sector by selling interests in the firm’s substantial infrastructure, power and mining assets to create global Tier-1 engineering and construction capability in oil and gas, mining, power and infrastructure. Card’s career began in the summer of 1975 as an intern at CH2M Hill where he rose to become a Group CEO, board member and the largest shareholder of the Denver, Colorado-based global engineering firm. CH2M HILL is a world leader in program management and water and environment services and was ranked #1 in sustainability in its industry by Verdantix. At CH2M HILL, he was the sponsoring executive and deputy project director for the delivery partner for the highly successful London 2012 Olympics. He was also the CEO of joint venture Kaiser-Hill in the decommissioning of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, which is the only major nuclear weapons facility to be completely decommissioned. It is now a wildlife refuge.

From 2001 to 2004, he served as the Under Secretary of Energy in the United States Department of Energy where he was responsible for the Department’s energy, environment and science portfolios with an annual budget of $14 billion and 65,000 federal and contractor employees. This tenure saw what was at the time record funding for renewable and carbon-free energy and research, accelerated progress in the environmental remediation of the Department’s legacy sites and the completion of the original Human Genome Project, setting the stage for the next wave of major science projects. His interests in corporate social responsibility coupled with business success are hallmarks of his career.

Early Life, Family and Education

Card was born to engineer and farmer Brad and Dorothy Card in California, but grew up on a farm in Yakima, Washington. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington and Master of Science degree in Environmental Engineering from Stanford. His spouse, Nancy, is also an engineer and after she obtained her MBA from Harvard, he followed her there to complete the Harvard Business School Program for Management Development. The Cards focus their charitable work on the poor and underprivileged with an emphasis on water and the environment. Nancy serves on the board of the global water charity Water for People.

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