Stanley Consultants is an Iowa-based engineering and consulting firm that has been designing infrastructure since 1913. From its Muscatine headquarters, the employee-owned company works across transportation, power, water and civil engineering, with projects spanning the United States and beyond. Stanley led the interchange design on the new I-490 Tollway near O’Hare, engineering the tri-level connection between I-490 and Illinois Route 390. The firm’s practice runs from highways and bridges to power delivery and water systems, the backbone work that keeps regions moving. More than a century in, Stanley remains one of the Midwest’s steadier names in infrastructure design.
Stanley Consultants has changed its name almost as many times as it has changed decades. The firm traces its founding to 1913, when Charles H. Young established Central States Engineering in Muscatine, Iowa. The company was renamed Young and Stanley, Inc. in 1932 after Young sold a minority stake to brothers Max and Art Stanley, then became Stanley Engineering Company in 1939 following Young’s retirement, before adopting its current name, Stanley Consultants, in 1966 to reflect a broadened, multi-disciplinary practice spanning architects, economists, construction managers and planners.
One artifact of that history survives today: in the late 1940s, Stanley began designating its employees as members, a term the firm says was meant to reflect their value to the company and its collaborative project-team philosophy, language the firm still uses internally.
Stanley Consultants states it is now 100% employee-owned, with more than 1,000 employees working from 20-plus locations worldwide. The firm’s own site organizes its offerings into eight solution areas: architecture, asset management, engineering and design, environmental and regulatory services, planning and consulting, program management, project management, and resilient analytics focused on climate risk.
The firm has taken on federal work for more than 75 years, including a 1991 contract, selected over 1,300 competing firms, to design two air bases in Kuwait, and later served as program manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on reconstruction planning in Iraq and hurricane-protection rebuilding in New Orleans. In 2007, Stanley Consultants named Gayle Roberts as its fifth president, making her, per the firm, the nation’s first female president of a large international engineering firm; Kate Harris now serves as president, CEO and chair of the board.
Recent growth has come through acquisition: in 2022, Stanley Consultants acquired Resilient Analytics, a climate-risk data and modeling firm, along with Florida-based Traffic Engineering Data Solutions, expanding its transportation planning, engineering and intelligent transportation systems capabilities in the Southeast. The firm currently ranks 120th on Engineering News-Record’s Top 500 Design Firms list and 178th on ENR’s Top 225 International Design Firms list.
From rural electrification projects in the 1930s Midwest to present-day climate-resilience analytics, Stanley Consultants’ own account of its history emphasizes continuity of ownership structure and culture across more than a century of shifting engineering markets.
