Silvia from Antwerp mapping Flemish tunnels and wins prestigious European award for engineers | Antwerp

Silvia Gioga, a structural engineer at Arcadis Belgium for design and consultancy, won the WICE award in the “Best Woman in Tunneling and Underground Construction”. “It is the first time that one of our employees has won an award in this prestigious European competition,” says Arkadis proudly.

The WICE Awards will be presented for the seventh time this year. With these awards, the organizers want to convince more women to take a step into the construction and engineering sector. “At Arcades, we are also doing our best to feminize this sector. Our ambition is to employ 40 percent of female engineers within a few years.”

Gioja works on behalf of the Flemish Road and Traffic Agency (AWV) to better manage tunnels through the digital tools of 20 Flemish tunnels. For example, I turned the Kennedy Tunnel into a virtual reality model to get a better view of the tunnel’s condition and the need for maintenance and renovation. In this way, for example, tunnel maintenance can be better planned so that traffic flow in this particularly congested place works better.

See the unique 3D images of the Kennedy Tunnel at the bottom of this article.