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Even as a teenager, Sonya Gabrielson felt a calling to become a civil engineer. The genesis was a combination of nature and nurture. The nature part: math came easily to her, and she was good at it. As for the nurture piece, she was raised in a water-conscious household. Her dad worked for the Environmental Protection Agency managing watershed grants. Her mom, who immigrated from Australia, had grown up in an arid environment where water was so highly valued that people kept a bucket in the shower to capture water for flushing the toilet. That conservationist ethic rubbed off on Sonya. “Water was always part of my upbringing,” she says. “So civil engineering seemed like a good match for me.”

Sonya grew up in Seattle and attended the University of Washington, earning a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Some formative projects early in her professional career reinforced her interest in coastal resilience. Notably, she worked on the Rebuild by Design–Hudson River initiative, one of the first infrastructure projects planned in response to Superstorm Sandy’s devastation in New Jersey and New York. Backed by a $300 million grant, the federally funded program aimed to protect low-lying parts of Hoboken, New Jersey, against future flooding from storm surge.

In 2021, Sonya moved from Seattle to the Bay area and joined Sherwood to focus her work on resilient engineering. She arrived at Sherwood having already earned credentials as a WEDG (Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines) Associate from the Waterfront Alliance, an organization dedicated to preparing coastal communities for sea level rise and climate change. 

“The tenets of good waterfront design start with holistic thinking that involves not just design professionals, but the folks who live, work, and play in the impacted areas,” she notes. “We as design professionals can get data about the topography, rainfall intensity, or how high the tides will rise. But there’s an additional lens of information that’s given by the people who live in a place and know, for example, that a particular street corner floods every time it rains.” A successful resilient waterfront project is informed by bringing in a layer of local expertise from people who are personally impacted by that project, she says.

Sonya’s enthusiasm for coastal resilience is a constant influence in her daily life. “It goes beyond the client. It goes to conversations I have with everyone. It’s something I’m extremely passionate about. Even people not in the climate change arena tend to relate to this. I want folks to understand the issues, because it’s hard to conceptualize a lot of these long-term risks.”

Adding to her appreciation of water, Sonya took up scuba diving in 2017. Diving has taken her to the Fiji Islands as well as Mexico, Greece, Australia, Hawaii, and Indonesia. “Diving gives me a visceral respect for nature,” she explains. “I find that being underwater with such otherworldly creatures gives me a feeling of being graciously welcomed into a space that is not mine, and which makes me grateful and want to protect those experiences.”

Outside of the office, she’s also had the chance to share her expertise with college students. Recently she lectured to graduate students in landscape architecture at UC-Berkeley. “It was so fun to introduce them to a civil engineer’s quantitative perspective on designing for sea level rise,” she says. Later she gave a talk to graduate students in real estate. “It was such a great opportunity to bring the engineering lens to this group that will be involved in land acquisition and development. These issues could well impact their financial prospectus when evaluating a site.”

While sea level rise has been receiving greater attention in recent years, Sonya says she believes public acceptance of the risks will increase in the future. “Engineers have designed for earthquakes, wind flows, and gravity for a long time as science has existed to substantiate the impacts of those demands,” Sonya says. “I tend to think of sea level rise as something that is just starting to catch up.”

So, for now, she continues to expand her influence on Sherwood’s coastal resilience projects. And she’ll keep talking about sea level rise to anyone who will listen. When the rest of the world catches up, she’ll be ready.

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