Elif Acar-Chiasson
CEE Hall of Distinction: 2022
Elif Acar-Chiasson is a registered professional engineer with over 30 years of progressive engineering, management, and leadership experience in complex civil, geotechnical, and geo-environmental projects. As an engineer, Ms. Chiasson designed and lead projects in array of industries spanning from energy & chemicals to power generation, heavy manufacturing, multi-modal transportation, and defense. The depth of her technical and project delivery expertise, coupled with her experience in operations and passion in talent development, gives her the unique ability to respond to multiple stakeholder interests and needs.
Ms. Chiasson was born in Istanbul, Turkey. In 1988, after completing her undergraduate studies at the Bogazici University in Istanbul, she moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to continue her graduate studies at LSU as a research assistant in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. While she was accepted by several prestigious graduate programs across the US, it was a particular research program involving design with geosynthetics conducted at LSU that influenced her decision to join the Forever LSU Family.
Currently, Ms. Chiasson serves as CSRS’ Executive Vice President of Talent and Innovation. In this role, Ms. Chiasson oversees the technical practice areas of the firm and mentors many of CSRS’ professionals. With her extensive industry knowledge, she creates the strategy and culture required for employees to experiment with the right resources at the right level to support their career progression. Ms. Chiasson is responsible for forecasting the dynamic changes on the markets, which are the result of the increasing competition and fast technical progress. True to CSRS’ innovative character, she encourages staff at all levels to actively seek and create knowledge, and to use it to enhance effectiveness and competitive advantage. In this role, Ms. Chiasson manages the innovation process by focusing on developing new, or changed processes, solutions in the scope of marketing, as well as organizational methods. For all new company innovations and objectives, she employs and leads talented employees appropriately, including mentoring and professional development. Ms. Chiasson focuses on creating new ways to ensure knowledge is a smooth connection of acquired experience, values, context information, and expert approach to constitute the framework for the assessment and inclusion of new experiences and information.
At CSRS, Ms. Chiasson also served in the roles of Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Project and Program Delivery. In these roles, she provided the leadership, management, and vision necessary to ensure that CSRS had the proper operational controls, administrative and reporting procedures, and people systems in place to effectively grow the organization and to ensure financial strength and operating efficiency. Ms. Chiasson had the overall responsibility of driving execution and creating best practices for the firm’s services. Under her leadership, CSRS developed and implemented a state-of-the-art project controls and technology-enabled business systems facilitating effective communication of critical information in formats that allow managers to optimize financial performance during execution and the firm’s leadership to make effective business-related decisions. Ms. Chiasson has achieved several significant accomplishments including ground-up development of project tools such as project status reports, dynamic dashboards, estimate templates, and rolling forecasts. She also developed a start-to-finish project tracking methodology that greatly enhanced the ability to efficiently monitor the status and financial health of all projects.
In the early days of her post graduate professional career, Ms. Chiasson joined the IT Corporation, a national consulting firm where she had the opportunity to expand and grow her skills in geo-environmental and geotechnical engineering applications, primarily in chemical and petrochemical industries. Subsequently, she joined Electrokinetics, a firm started by her late husband Yalcin B. Acar, PhD, PE in the Louisiana Business and Technology Center, the predecessor of LSU Innovation Park, to commercialize its advanced solutions to hazardous waste contamination using electrochemistry. Following the unexpected death of her husband, she took the leadership of the firm and continued to build a diverse client list that included both industrial and governmental agencies such as DOD, DOE, USACE, US Navy, EPA, and EPRI. Under her leadership, Electrokinetics completed two EPA Superfund Innovative Technology Evaluation program projects and in 1996, it was awarded the Small Business Innovative Research Phase II Quality Award from DOD for its technical achievement and contributions to the US Army.
In 2002, Ms. Chiasson joined Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure, Inc. where served as project manager and eventually as the Engineering Business Line Manager for the Gulf Central District until 2013. In this role, she set the department’s strategy and direction, provided functional leadership for the engineering team, managed resource optimization, and delegated resources to support project requirements, schedules, and department budget. During her eleven-year tenure, Ms. Chiasson led and took part in engineering design and management of notable projects in the State of Louisiana such as the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Hurricane Protection Project, which received ENR's Best of the Best 2011 Best Civil Works/Infrastructure Award, and the state-of-the-art AP-1000TM nuclear power plant module assembly facility in Lake Charles, LA.
Ms. Chiasson hold a BS in Civil Engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey and a M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
