Grove School duo wins Thornton Tomasetti engineering scholarships

Grove School of Engineering seniors Abraham “Avi” Rubel and Xinbin Xu are the recipients of scholarships from international engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti. The awards were established by the Manhattan-based company in memory of former executives and City College of New York alumni Lee Petrella ’80, and Daniel A. Cuoco ’67.

Rubel is the winner of the 2018 Lee Petrella Memorial Scholarship and Summer Internship. The award provides a $5,000 scholarship and a paid internship to a civil engineering major. Rubel, who’s specializing in structures, interned with Thornton Tomasetti’s Structural Engineering practice last summer.

Thomas Scarangello, Thornton Tomasetti chairman and CEO, said competition for the Petrella Scholarship had been fierce, and stands as a testament to Petrella’s dedication as a mentor and brilliant engineer. “Our structural engineering team thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with Avi throughout his summer internship in our New York office and we look forward to his continued academic success.”

A leader in the firm’s Structural Engineering practice, Petrella was a vice president in Thornton Tomasetti’s New York Madison Avenue office when he died in 2012. He spent more than 30 years with the company and was involved in many of its signature projects. These include the Shanghai Tower in China, New York’s World Financial Center and Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from CCNY with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.

Xu is the winner of the Daniel A. Cuoco Endowed Memorial Scholarship.  It provides $5,000 annually to a structural engineering student.

Cuoco’s career with Thornton Tomasetti spanned 40 years. The former president and CEO helped establish the firm as a world leader in structural design and forensics. Cuoco, who died in 2014, was an early adopter of emerging technologies, such as building information modeling, and was an active mentor to young engineers.

“As we at Thornton Tomasetti continue to celebrate the life of Daniel Cuoco, we are proud to provide top engineering students like Xinbin with a scholarship in Daniel’s memory that will help them achieve their goals and move forward in their careers,” said Scarangello.

About The Grove School
Established as The City College School of Technology, the Grove School is celebrating its centennial. Approximately 3,300 students pursue degrees at the baccalaureate, masters and PhD levels in seven disciplines: biomedical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Named for Andrew S. Grove, ’60, one of the founders of Intel Corp., it is the only public school of engineering within New York City and one of the most diverse engineering schools in the nation.

About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its role at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.2% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. More than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight professional schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself.  View CCNY Media Kit.