Retired Partner
SawTeen See, P.E., C.E., Dist. M. ASCE
SawTeen See has extensive experience in the structural design of the full spectrum of building types. Following her bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Cornell University, she joined Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA) in 1978. She was promoted to Partner in 1986 and was Managing Partner from 1991 through her withdrawal from the firm at the end of 2017.
SawTeen is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. She is on the Advisory Board of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. In 2017, SawTeen was featured in the CTBUH Journal’s Special Issue: “Women in the Tall Building Industry”. She was one of three professionals representing architecture, developer, and engineering in the 2016 AIA-CTBUH program “Women Shaping the Urban Habitat”. The 2006 ASCE publication “Changingour World: True Stories of Women Engineers” featured SawTeen as a structural engineer. She received the Asian Women in Business Leadership Award in 2006. In 2002, she received a Professional Achievement Award from Professional Women in Construction.
As Partner-in-Charge, SawTeen led the structural design of some of the world’s tallest buildings including the 630-m PNB 118 Tower in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the 555-m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea (the fifth tallest building in the world); the 492-m Shanghai World Financial Center in Shanghai, China; and the AIG (now AIA) Tower in Hong Kong. Additionally, she led the peer review of the Busan Lotte Tower, the 530-m Guangzhou CTF Finance Center, the 530-m Tianjin CTF Finance Center, IFC 1 and IFC 2 in Hong Kong, the International Commerce Center, Hong Kong, and dozens of other challenging projects. Her museum and other institutional projects include the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, OH; the Miho Museum and Bridge in Kyoto, Japan; the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, PA; the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, NC; the Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, China; the Seattle Art Museum, WA; the Ambulatory Care Facility at Bellevue Hospital in New York, NY; the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA; the Baltimore Convention Center expansion in Baltimore, MD; and the National Library of Latvia in Riga, Latvia. Some of her other recent projects include the Minmetals Headquarters in Shenzhen, China; the Suzhou landscaped bridges in Suzhou, China; and the new Temple University Library in Philadelphia, PA.
She served on the Board of Directors of the New York Association of Consulting Engineers from 1989 to 1993, as well as on its Structural Codes Committee. She received the New York Association of Consulting Engineers' Award for Dedicated Service, 1993. For her work on the San Jose Convention Center, she was cited by Engineering News-Record as one of "Those Who Made Marks in the Construction Industry" in 1988. She was Chairman of the Committee on Gravity Loads and Temperature Effects of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).
She has written many technical papers on tall buildings and structural engineering, and has presented at various universities such as Cornell, Stanford, and MIT, and for professional organizations in the US and overseas such as the AIA, CTBUH, Structural Engineers World Congress in Singapore, engineering societies in Costa Rica, and Colombia.