Our Leadership

Joe Magallanes leads K&C as President and CEO. As President/CEO, Joe guides the strategic direction for the organization, facilitates technologies needed to solve customer’s needs, and supports K&C’s capacity to deliver the internationally recognized products and services K&C is known for over 75 years. Joe is an experienced engineer, scientist, and technical leader, with over 20 years’ experience. His subject matter expertise lies in computational mechanics, material characterization and modeling, and developing advanced simulation techniques and software. Early in his career, Joe was heavily involved with private and Government (defense) test sites, supporting blast, impact, and shock testing with advanced simulations, designing structures for a variety of service and extreme loading conditions (ranging from landmark buildings to aerospace structures), and has since applied this experience to solve challenging problems in various industries (ranging from biomedical to advanced manufacturing). He is a licensed Structural Engineer (California) and is extremely passionate about applying advanced scientific and engineered technologies to solve our most important and pressing challenges.

Mr. Abraham is a Principal and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Karagozian and Case (K&C). In this corporate role, he guides K&C’s technology vision and provides strategic leadership in the areas of technology, engineering, as well as the development of new products and services. His responsibilities also include marketing of K&C’s technologies and capabilities, creation of advanced technologies, and development of strategic corporate partnerships. As a Principal at K&C, Mr. Abraham leads interdisciplinary science and engineering projects with emphasis in the fields of thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, turbulence, chemical kinetics, energetic materials, structural materials, composites, and heat transfer. His experience and research interests range from early concept development of novel products/systems to test and evaluation of technology solutions that are in production or deployment. Mr. Abraham uses advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD) computations as well as high performance computing (HPC) resources to support the design and qualification of products and systems used in military and commercial applications. His research and development (R&D) experience includes support of products and systems related to aerospace, ships, weapons, weapon effects on vehicles and structures, energetic materials, and explosive safety.

Zach is a Principal and Chief Operating Officer with K&C responsible for day-to-day operations, business development and company strategic growth. His expertise stems from composite materials for structural retrofit and blast mitigation. Over the past fifteen years Zach has researched, developed and designed composite materials to retrofit structures for seismic excitation and potential blast loads and impacts. He is a licensed professional engineer and holds two patents related to blast and protective design. Zach’s capabilities include blast mitigation, structural and seismic retrofit, progressive collapse analysis and the design and use of advanced composites including fiber reinforced polymers, polyureas and advanced concretes.

Leo is a Principal for K&C, primarily providing engineering services pertaining to protective design. He is also the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and is responsible for managing K&C’s financial health. Leo has over 15 years of experience designing, analyzing, and constructing buildings and other facilities following conventional design practices; he also provides specialist engineering services pertaining to the design of structures to resist a variety of extreme loads, particularly those emanating from blast effects. Before joining K&C in 2006, he worked for two other respected engineering firms (Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers and Wiss Janney Elstner Associates), where he completed dozens of successful projects. His unique relationship-based approach to communicating and understanding the needs of the client has allowed him to effectively align K&C’s highly technical staff so as to well satisfy the client’s needs in developing a work product. Leo is especially proficient at working with multi-disciplinary architectural, engineering, and construction firms to properly implement blast and impact resistant designs.

Dr. Lan has 25 years of experience in structural engineering, principally focusing on the numerical analyses of structures for blast and impact effects. Dr. Lan is a Principal and Vice-President for K&C, where he supports the company through his technical and business development activities. He has performed numerous high-fidelity physics-based (HFPB) finite element simulations for blast and impact effects on various protective structures/systems for evaluating their blast/impact resistance and determining their design parameters. His HFPB models have been used for the pretest predictions of many large scale blast field tests and vehicle crash tests and validated and verified with posttest analysis of these tests. He has accumulated extensive experience in predicting blast/impact response and evaluating post-blast damage of reinforced and steel structures.

Mark is a Principal at K&C with over fifteen years of structural design engineering experience that has largely focused on designing infrastructure to mitigate the effects of blast, impact, and shock loads. He leads many of K&C’s applied research and testing programs involving hardened structures as well as design efforts aimed at developing innovative structural solutions capable of protecting people and critical infrastructure in the event of malicious man-made and accidental explosion threats. Mark is also actively engaged with professional organizations and committees devoted to advancing the state of the art in protective construction. He currently leads the Blast Connections Research Council and is the secretary of the ACI 370 “Blast and Impact Load Effects” committee.

Asher Gehl is a Principal for K&C and the Managing Director of the K&C Australian Office. He is a chartered structural engineer and Principal Member of the UK CPNI Registery of Security Engineers and Specialists (RSES). Asher has seventeen years of experience in protective design and structural vulnerability assessments from blast and impact. Asher has a long history of experience and exposure to explosive safety, counterterrorism and security and has successfully delivered numerous high-profile projects requiring design for blast, vehicular impact and progressive collapse. Asher’s experience on complex projects with a key technical role including responsibility for coordination across several disciplines has made him a valuable asset to any project. He has been associated with major projects across all major sectors including Commercial and multi-purpose buildings, Defence, Government, Transport, Mining, and Civil Infrastructure. He has worked closely with major builders on large Design and Construct projects where tight deadlines and prompt design delivery have been critical. Asher has developed a trusting working relationship with key Australian Commonwealth and State government stakeholders including Defence, Police and Transport Security and is on the Executive Committee for the International Association of Protective Structures (Australia).

Agi joined K&C in 2009 tasked with all the accounting and financial functions for the company. Since 2009 she has served as the Accountant. Currently she works primarily with Accounting, Financial, Contract reviews, Government reporting and Audit compliance. Her primary responsibilities include bank and government relations, audit process and the daily financial obligations of the company. While at K&C she has pursued her Bachelor Degree from Business Administration – Specialized in Accounting and she graduated Suma Cum Laude from Capella University.

Mr. Crawford accumulated over 45 years’ experience and became a recognized expert in the design, analysis, and testing of structural and mechanical systems and components subjected to blast, shock, and impact loads. After having served as President of K&C for over 15 years, where he led and grew Karagozian & Case, Inc., to an internationally recognized scientific and engineering firm, he became a Principal and Chairman of the Board. Throughout his distinguished career, John visited numerous embassies and other government and commercial facilities where consideration of blast and impact threats are important, providing vulnerability assessments and designs for reducing their risks to terrorist attacks. He performed peer reviews of other A&E’s blast effects related designs, provided technical support in legal matters related to blast and shock effects and structural failures, and generated a variety of software tools for design and analysis related to blast and shock.