Quick Facts
Biography
Robert Gordon Card (born February 1953) is the former CEO of SNC-Lavalin, Canada’s largest engineering and construction firm, with over 40,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenues, and the builder of many iconic projects worldwide.
Early life, family and education
Card was born to engineer and farmer Brad and Dorothy Card in California, but grew up on a farm in Yakima, Washington. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington and Master of Science degree in Environmental Engineering from Stanford.His spouse, Nancy, is also an engineer and after she obtained her MBA from Harvard, he followed her there to complete the Harvard Business School Program for Management Development. The Cards focus their charitable work on the poor and underprivileged with an emphasis on water and the environment.
Career
Card’s career began in the summer of 1975 as an intern at CH2M Hill, where he became a Group CEO, board member and the largest shareholder of the Denver, Colorado-based global engineering firm. At CH2M Hill, he was the sponsoring executive and deputy project director for the delivery partner for the London 2012 Olympics.From 2001 to 2004, Card served as the Under Secretary of Energy in the United States Department of Energy, where he was responsible for the Department’s energy, environment and science portfolios with an annual budget of $14 billion and 65,000 federal and contractor employees. This tenure saw what was at the time record funding for renewable and carbon-free energy and research, accelerated progress in the environmental remediation of the Department’s legacy sites and the completion of the original Human Genome Project, setting the stage for the next wave of major science projects.
From October 2012 to October 2015, Card served as the CEO of Montreal, Canada-based SNC-Lavalin to lead a recovery effort after the firm identified and reported ethics issues from the previous decade.Card initiated a revamp of the firm’s governance, ethics and compliance program and transformed initiatives in health and safety, environment, sustainability and other aspects of corporate social responsibility. He also developed a strategy to maintain the firm’s position at the top of the rapidly consolidating engineering and construction sector by selling interests in the firm’s substantial infrastructure, power and mining assets to create global Tier-1 engineering and construction capability in oil and gas, mining, power and infrastructure.
Card was the CEO of joint venture Kaiser-Hill in the decommissioning of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant.
He was ranked among Canada’s 100 highest paid CEOs in 2015.
Card was appointed a member of the board of AMEC Foster Wheeler in 2017.