2025 Charles W. Gruber Association Leadership Award

Charles W. Gruber (1910–2001) was a pioneer in the field of air pollution control. His contributions to the field of air pollution control and the Association were numerous and significant. He joined the Association in 1938 and made important contributions during the transitional years from 1948 to 1952, when the Association was transformed from a relatively closed smoke-oriented organization to one that addressed in name, philosophy, and structure the broader dimensions of air pollution control. In 1950, he became the first president of the reorganized and renamed Association. During his term of office, he conceived of the present technical committee structure and guided its development through the early years. In 1980, the Association awarded Honorary Membership to Gruber for more than 40 years of leadership and continuing contributions to the organization. The Charles W. Gruber Association Leadership Award is presented to an individual who has provided outstanding service to the Association through leadership positions at both international and local levels and who has contributed toward the achievement of the mission and objectives of the Association. The recipient will have demonstrated sincere, constant, and unselfish efforts over the course of his or her membership toward the betterment of the Association.

A&WMA presents the 2025 Charles W. Gruber Association Leadership Award to Helen Ginzburg.

Helen Ginzburg is a senior air quality specialist at VHB. Before VHB, for 30 years she worked at WSP, formerly Parsons Brinckerhoff. Over the course of her career, Helen worked on numerous projects, small and large, for the public and private clients, and managed many air quality projects of different sizes and complexity.

Located in New York, Helen worked on many important New York projects including iconic Hudson Yards, Penn Station Access, LaGuardia Airport Central Terminal Building, 175 Park Avenue and 343 Madison Avenue developments, Resilient Edgemere and many, many others. Helen led the air quality monitoring during the controversial Second Avenue Subway construction, the project that was planned since 1920s and was revived almost a century later. It was partially completed in 2017. For 35 years Helen, was involved in the Boston’s Central Artery Tunnel project, the largest, most challenging highway project in the history of the United States. The project replaced deteriorating elevated Central Artery (I-93) with an underground highway, two new bridges over Charles River and extended I-90 to Logan Airport. This project reconnected downtown Boston, reduced traffic and improved mobility in one of the America’s oldest and most congested major cities, not to mention that it contributed to continued growth in Massachusetts and New England. The other projects of notice in Helen’s portfolio are Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement in Seattle, Port of Miami Tunnel, Whittier Bridge Replacement in Massachusetts, Coronado Tunnel in San Diego, Goethals Bridge Replacement in New York and New Jersey, to name a few.  

Helen also participated in several noticeable international projects like the Panama Canal expansion, Istanbul Strait Road Tube Crossing (a road tunnel under Bosporus), Singapore Kallang Expressway and Paya Lebar Expressway, projects that involved roadway tunnels in Australia and Canada.

Earlier in her career, Helen pioneered using hour-by-hour meteorological data for the mobile source modeling which led to creation of the CAL3QHC/R model to development of which she contributed. Based on the wind-tunnel studies of the tunnel exhaust emissions, she created a model to estimate dispersion of the emissions from vehicular tunnels. This model is now part of the British analog of AERMOD, ADMS, Atmospheric Dispersion Modeling System.  

Helen was always involved in research. She was a principal investigator on a couple of National Academy of Sciences NCHRP projects, the Quick Reference Guide for Traffic Engineers for Generating Traffic and Activity Data for Project-Level Air Quality Analysis and the study to determine emissions of re-entrained road dust for transportation projects. Helen led the 4-year study of near road PM2.5 concentrations for MDOT SHA and FHWA. She participated in several research investigations during the Central Artery project including a study to determine NOx to NO2 short-term conversion rates at close distances. Helen authored 46 papers, most of which were presented at the A&WMA conferences.

Helen is actively involved in A&WMA and TRB. She joined A&WMA in 1991 and soon started as a secretary to the Environmental Transportation Division, working in the On- and Off-Road Mobile Source TCC, later to become a TCC vice-chair, chair and an ET Division chair, and recently served as an Environmental Management Group coordinator. In 2016, Helen started as a member of the Technical Council and is currently serving as the ET Division vice-chair. As a chair and organizing committee member, Helen, along with the organizing committee, prepared successful specialty conference “Freight & Environment: Ports of Entry,” which was already held three times.