To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ENR Award of Excellence, Newsmakers and winners from across the years joined this year’s class and winner, Anvil Builders’ CEO HT Tran, on stage at the gala in New York City on April 16.

While hanging out with friends in his California living room one day in 2006, HT Tran had an epiphany that changed his career path and the direction of his life. The wounded Army veteran whose family fled Vietnam went on to start a fast-growing construction firm that's building San Francisco and careers for fellow veterans.

What started as an effort by Bob Nilsson, a U.S. Marine vet with a broken leg to help other Vietnam War wounded heal at a Navy hospital in Queens, N.Y., has grown decades later into a nationwide crusade to transition veterans, injured and not, into entrepreneurs in the construction sector—and beyond.

George J. Pierson has had his share of kudos for engineering the sale last October of global design firm giant Parsons Brinckerhoff in what many consider an impressive $1.35-billion deal.

Like the maestro of a Wagnerian opera, Michael Marchesano conducted a chorus of 400 workers, 19 concrete pumps, 208 mixers and eight batch plants to perform a 19.5-hour continuous concrete placement for the Wilshire Grand Center's foundation.

Early in the process of building Florida Polytechnic University's $60-million Innovation, Science and Technology building, architect Santiago Calatrava expressed his doubts to Skanska USA Building's project leader, Chuck Jablon, about the ability of U.S. craft workers to deliver the quality the architect envisioned.