Anh-Tuan Le: A Bridge Building Visionary

Anh-Tuan Le graduated at age 16 as valedictorian of his high school in Michigan where his family settled in the early 1960s. Despite his wide-ranging interests in arts and sciences, he chose to become a structural engineer “to rebuild bridges destroyed in war”. After earning both B.S. and M.S. at age 20 from the University of Michigan, he started his career first in San Diego, then in San Francisco where he raised his family and resided for 30 years. Why San Francisco? Anh-Tuan admitted he was awestruck by the bridges that majestically sweep the SF Bay Area -- he eventually consulted for four of the Bay Area’s seven bridges, including the iconic Golden Gate Bridge and the modern San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Born by Hanoi’s West Lake, Anh-Tuan Le has traveled around the world in his youth with his diplomat family and, as an adult, for his various international megaproject postings. In Robin Williams’ Patch Adams movie, ‘home’ means where the journey starts, but ‘home’ is also a lifelong destination. Today, Anh-Tuan considers ‘home’ to be Westminster, CA – the city where Vietnamese refugees settled, where its “Little Saigon District” that has sprawled into four adjoining cities has become the de facto capital of Vietnam’s diaspora. Recognizing the irony, Anh-Tuan muses, “I didn’t have to return to Vietnam because my people came here instead...as new arrivals, we are guileless in our belief in the American Dream.” During his Westminster residency, Anh-Tuan seeks to encourage the next generations to “devote time to community-edifying projects befitting our capacity to create and build.” Developing quality mixed-use multi-family housing at infill sites ranks high among the budding passions for this tireless engineer.

Anh-Tuan obtained his California Civil Engineer license and the coveted Structural Engineer Title at relatively young ages, 21 and 23 respectively. At the time, the licensing law required U.S. citizenship and a minimum age of 25 to apply -- Anh-Tuan was neither but got exempt. Anh-Tuan’s problem-solving knack and versatility caused his rise to take on ever-increasing charge of a wide range of projects – from buildings to bridges and tunnels, from process plants to hydroelectric facilities, from water resource and pipeline studies to the design of waterfront and marine structures. Anh-Tuan has worked on several major rail transit programs in the San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles regions, and in Atlanta and Miami in the eastern U.S. Early in his career, he designed the guideway structures for the first and only automated people mover in a U.S. shopping mall at Pearlridge, Honolulu, which still runs today. Coming full circle, for the past ten years Anh-Tuan has been on Honolulu’s 21-mile long, $10 billion program to build America’s first driverless rail mass transit system which started operating last June. Anh-Tuan looks fondly on the deep-sea oil and gas platforms in the UK Sector of the North Sea, and in New Zealand and Western Australia, which he considers the most technically complex and interesting in a long career: each project was in record-breaking water depths designed to sustain 100-year storm conditions, thus requiring advanced design analyses and near-flawless execution by international contractors working to tight schedule demands.

Besides his professional work, Anh-Tuan has been active on boards and commissions that involve international trade, regional planning, transportation, urban beautification, housing advocacy, youth education, refugee assistance (including skills training and job development), and community revitalization and economic development. He plays the violin and classic guitar as hobbies, and his wife-husband vocal duets can be found on YouTube captures posted by fans of his wife Ylan, a celebrated pop diva in the Vietnamese community. Anh-Tuan explained, “My wife and I are different people with different jobs, but we share the joy and passion of our work...simply put, we strive to bring joy to people.”


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