Maika Pellegrino

Maika Pellegrino did not set out to spend her life in water. She started in general engineering in Brazil, moved into chemical engineering, and at the branching point chose environmental over the food industry because, as she puts it, "my heart was stronger than my stomach." Her first water work was groundwater remediation, which did not pay the bills in a country where environmental engineering was badly overlooked, so when Degrémont (the water-engineering business now part of Suez) offered her a job in pure water and wastewater treatment, she took it, and never left the sector.

Maika Pellegrino learned water from the construction side first. At Degrémont in Brazil she worked the full EPC chain (engineering, procurement and construction), choosing and designing every step from raw water to distribution, then going to site to oversee construction and commission the plants. Her first two weeks were spent commissioning a wastewater treatment plant. That build-side grounding, knowing what it actually takes to pour the concrete and start up the process, is the experience most consultant engineers never get, and it is why her later advice carries weight.

Maika Pellegrino and her husband left Brazil meaning to stay abroad just a few years. Degrémont and Suez moved her to Montreal in the same role, the plan was to experience something different and then go home, and "13, 14 years after, here still am I, and I don't think we are coming back soon." She moved from Degrémont to WSP and then, in 2020, to Jacobs, working on some of the largest treatment plants in Canada along the way, from Montreal's water and wastewater plants to the largest water treatment plant in Winnipeg, and shifting from the build-side to the consulting side that designs and plans them.

Maika Pellegrino describes consultant engineering as a kind of Lego. The process technologies are packages on a shelf; the engineering is taking those pieces and building the specific plant a particular client and community need, knowing that no two builds look the same. The harder part, she argues, is everything around the chemistry: a municipal water upgrade "doesn't bring votes," so budgets are tight and half the job is justifying taxpayers' money to management who would rather spend it where residents can see it, while juggling a stakeholder web of two-tier municipalities, ministries, operations and capital teams. It is a side of water technology that rarely makes the headlines and largely decides whether a project ever gets built.

Maika Pellegrino has a clear opinion about what gets undervalued. Nature-based, biological treatment uses far less energy and chemicals and gives more stable water quality, she says, but "just because it's less understood, less controllable, it's usually not considered." And she worries the field is moving too fast for the next generation to absorb the deep operational knowledge that makes good judgement possible, because the engineer who will run a plant for the next 25 years has to genuinely buy in, and the best technology on paper loses to the one the operator is willing to own.

“Engineering is getting all these packages that are on your shelf, and it's like a Lego at the end. You have the Legos, but you can build anything you want with that. The engineering part of it is to get the Lego pieces and build what your client wants, what the community needs.”

Maika Pellegrino is, in short, the kind of engineer the water sector runs on and rarely puts on stage: not the founder with a new molecule, but the person who has to make a real plant work for a real town, on a real budget, for the next twenty years.