Nitsch Engineering

Nitsch Engineering is a Boston civil engineering and land surveying firm working across New England and the eastern United States on higher education, healthcare, transportation and mixed-use development. Its work sits at the unglamorous end of a project: site and utility design, stormwater management, permitting, transportation engineering, sustainable design consulting and survey. Nitsch is the civil engineer on the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Virginia, a $350 million research building at Fontaine Research Park served by a new all-electric central energy plant using geoexchange and thermal storage. The firm is employee-owned and has long been visible in the region for advancing women into engineering leadership.

Judith Nitsch founded the firm in 1989. Nearly four decades later it works under a line about building better communities that is easy to claim and hard to verify, except that the firm also publishes the number which tests it: 96 percent of its work comes from repeat clients.

Seven service lines sit under the civil engineering banner. Civil, transportation and structural engineering, green infrastructure and resilience, planning, land surveying, and GIS. Keeping survey and GIS in-house alongside design is a practical advantage on brownfield and urban infill work, where the difference between the record plan and the actual ground is usually discovered by a surveyor.

The offices are Boston, Lawrence and Worcester in Massachusetts, Richmond in Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Eighteen market sectors are served, among them academic, healthcare, airports, bridges and culverts, and municipal work.

Named projects show the spread. The Center for Computing and Data Sciences at Boston University is a dense downtown academic tower. Weston Town Center is suburban mixed-use. The Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia is a commemorative landscape where the civil and structural work is the design rather than a support to it. Farlow Park Bridge and Pond Restoration in Newton is ecological restoration with a structure in it. Four different problems, all resolved at site engineering level.

The firm appeared in the Boston Globe’s 2021 Top Places to Work survey.