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This year’s winners of the John Tiratsoo Award for Young Achievement show two sides of the industry’s future: innovation and stewardship. One is pushing the technical frontier with drone-based magnetometry; the other is strengthening how major transmission systems are designed, delivered, and passed on to the next generation. Together, they reflect an industry that is both evolving and protecting what already works.
Mehdi Laichoubi, Skipper NDT, and Ian Kornfeld, National Grid, chat to Elizabeth Corner about advancing inspection technology, delivering major infrastructure, and what the next generation of pipeline professionals is focused on.
Creators and Guests
What is World Pipelines Podcast?
The World Pipelines podcast, with Elizabeth Corner, is a podcast that connects and unites pipeline professionals to learn about issues affecting the midstream oil and gas industry.
Welcome back to the World Pipelines Podcast. This episode is rather special. I'm talking to the two winners of the John Terrazzo Award for Young Achievement for 2026. This award given by Young Pipeliners International recognizes the achievements of individuals under 36 years of age who have demonstrated a valuable and original contribution to the pipeline industry. My first guest and award winner is Mehdi Leshoubi, Chief Technical Officer at Skipper NDT.
Elizabeth Corner:Mehdi leads the development of pipeline integrity technologies using unmanned and non contact inspection methods. His work focuses on applying magnetic measurement, advanced data interpretation, and geolocation algorithms to improve the safety and reliability of buried pipelines and facilities. Mehdi has played a key role in bringing field validated, drone based inspection to operational deployment, and he's an inventor with patents related to Skipper NDTs technology. World Pipelines helps oil and gas pipeline professionals stay informed about the midstream oil and gas sector, offering technical articles, regional briefings, project and contract news, and think pieces on pipelines all over the world. Register to receive a print or digital copy at worldpipelines.com and search World Pipelines on LinkedIn to join our community.
Elizabeth Corner:Welcome to the podcast, Mehdi, and congratulations on your win.
Mehdi Laichoubi:Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm very glad to have it.
Elizabeth Corner:Let's start by talking about what you love about your job and the work that you do at Skipper NTT.
Mehdi Laichoubi:Yes. Sure. The biggest thing I think that I love about my job is the fact that we are trying our best to innovate in an industry that has big standards. So that would be, I think, either the greatest achievement and the biggest fun on a day to day work.
Elizabeth Corner:So you enjoy the bits where you're pushing the boundaries and making new ground?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Absolutely. Here at Skipper NDT what we're really trying to do is to prove that magnetometry and the areal based method can be used as another tool in the toolbox. We're not here to what's existing, but just to provide another way, an alternative for operators to ensure safety for their network.
Elizabeth Corner:And what do you wish more people in the pipeline industry understood about what you do and what Skipper NDT does?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Actually, I would like them to understood that very last bit that here we're mainly trying to bring something more, not something else. We are just trying to bring another tool and understand the principle of magnetism and magnetometry that can be a bit obscure sometimes. So there is a learning curve, I would say, for that. But that technology is definitely useful, especially if you don't want to interrupt or disrupt your pipeline operations.
Elizabeth Corner:And what would you say is the hardest part when it comes to getting people on board about non contact inspection methods? Is it the technical challenge? Is it getting buy in? Is it getting things to the field? What's the biggest challenge?
Mehdi Laichoubi:I think, again, we had a I'm very glad that we had a very courageous industry that is able to give a chance to new technologies. I'm very happy with that. Definitely it's going to be this part of the technical and buy in. These kind of either sales are very technical in nature, so the learning curve exists. But there is definitely on the industry side, I would say, is definitely a need for the industry to kind of learn and put up new processes to get this kind of tool.
Mehdi Laichoubi:They are mainly focused on geohazards, river crossing and pipeline location. They really understand that. And the industry is definitely trying their best to bring this technology up to market.
Elizabeth Corner:And if an operator is listening, what's one practical thing that they could do differently this year based on what you're working on?
Mehdi Laichoubi:First would be clearly to identify where this kind of technology can be used. There are mainly three examples. That are all of them below one big umbrella is to know where your pipeline is precisely. From that you can derive a lot of other applications, which is where your pipeline is under a river crossing. So if you have dredging issues, if you want to know the depth of cover, if you want to know if your pipeline is tree spanning, there's definitely a use for that.
Mehdi Laichoubi:Second is simply you want to know the depth of cover on your pipeline on multiple miles of land to avoid encroachment from third parties. And final, geohazard. Your line is moving somewhere, you have great tools that are in use that are running through it. But these tools are top notch and give you great precision, are pretty expensive sometimes. There may be an alternative to give you information that will help you in your integrity management programme.
Mehdi Laichoubi:And in that part, Skipper NDT can play a role.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. And looking forward, say in two years time, what would you love to be normal in the industry that isn't normal yet today?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Again, this technology is a bit of my baby. I'm one of the inventors of the technology, so I would love for this technology to be normal, for the industry, the regulators to have standards regarding this technology, guidelines, so this technology is properly spread out and all the little bits that are unknowns or the unknown unknowns right now to be completely answered and for everyone to feel safe about using this technology.
Elizabeth Corner:Is there anything that you're particularly excited about for the future in the pipeline sector?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Absolutely. The will that I see more and more for pipeline operators and even big managers to initiate change in the industry is pretty impressive. Because it is a big industry with a lot of standards and a lot of, say, consequences. So I'm completely excited to see our technology come up to market, but other technologies come up to market. We've seen at the QPAM Innovation award great technologies that were awarded, and I'm happy to see that more and more in this industry.
Mehdi Laichoubi:Because one thing for sure: innovation will make safety greater, prices go down, that's all we need.
Elizabeth Corner:Okay, let's do some quick fire questions if you're up for it. So if you weren't building inspection tech for pipeliners, what do you think you would be inventing?
Mehdi Laichoubi:That's a great question. My initial field of expertise is in aerospace. Actually, I was in the pipeline industry by mistake. I started Whiskey for NDT as an intern and with a lot of courage from everyone in this company, they brought me to post office as CTO. I would probably still be in aerospace related field, I think.
Elizabeth Corner:We're all here by mistake, Mehdi. Are we more conservative or more innovative as an industry?
Mehdi Laichoubi:There is definitely I think there are multiple communities in the industry, some that have the objective of being innovative and some of them that have the objective of being conservative. And all of that is a dialectic, it's a discussion between the two to find where to put the right threshold. We need to be absolutely conservative because there are standards and we want to ensure reliability. But innovation is necessary to push the boundaries. So there's definitely an in between.
Elizabeth Corner:Great answer. Are you an early bird or a night owl?
Mehdi Laichoubi:I'm absolutely a night owl, have to say. Yeah, that's something that can be difficult for work. But Europe and I go in The US and the jetlab does do me a good favor for that thing.
Elizabeth Corner:Absolutely. And do you find some of your best thinking is done on the plane?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Some of them in the plane where it's like 2AM somewhere. Definitely I have good ideas, yeah.
Elizabeth Corner:What's the most unexpected place that your job has taken you?
Mehdi Laichoubi:Oh, probably in the middle of nowhere, on an island, completely remote in the middle of Malaysia, where, yeah, we had great experience.
Elizabeth Corner:And what advice would you give to your younger self on day one in the industry? So let's say day one of your internship. What advice would you have given yourself?
Mehdi Laichoubi:I would probably say trust yourself. You're going to be lucky and just, yeah, keep working and don't think too much.
Elizabeth Corner:Says a very hardworking man. Thank you so much, Mehdi, for being on the podcast.
Mehdi Laichoubi:Thank you very much for having me.
Elizabeth Corner:My next guest and award winner is Ian Kornfeld, regional engineering manager for National Grid's Downstate New York Gas Transmission Engineering and Design Team. Ian has over ten years of industry experience leading a team through a large scale capital engineering and construction portfolio and has worked on some of the largest natural gas infrastructure projects that the company has seen in the territory. Projects have included over five miles of 30 inch steel high pressure main, gate stations, heaters, and other complex installations throughout the region. Ian has also led many company efforts for standardization, working to improve processes, standards, and engineering knowledge transfer. Hello, Ian.
Elizabeth Corner:Welcome to the podcast and many congratulations on your award win.
Ian Kornfeld:Well, thank you. I appreciate the welcome and thank you for having me. I'm excited to go with the flow today.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. Now let's start with something simple. Can you start by explaining what you do for your job? So what do you spend your days doing? What do you spend most of your time thinking about?
Ian Kornfeld:Sure, yeah, we have a very interesting unit here, organization solely focused on the Downstate region. So this would include our Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island territories and our Long Island, New York territory for those who are familiar. But I currently lead a team of mechanical and civil engineers. We're focused solely on what we would consider the complex capital projects for the company, and our work involves largely engineering design, but we work with multiple internal and external stakeholders to engineer and design our projects. We serve as a technical subject matter experts through construction phase and our record closeout processes, so our team starts from pretty much the creation of the project, the inception of it, through the end to make sure that we get a high quality product.
Ian Kornfeld:My day to day largely varies, but typically includes a lot of project team meetings, a formal design and constructability reviews, a lot of QAQC of drawing packages, permit submissions, resource coordination and outage planning calls, coordination with external parties for asset protection and crossings, and work a lot with our project sponsors to help develop these projects through our capital portfolio. So at any given day it could be very much unique. I'd say variability of the work is so wide, but I'd say consistently my thinking is how we can perform our job more efficiently and effectively. And I think efficiency has become an increased focus across many companies where evaluation of our tasks and discussions and how we assign items, how we have the tools to get those items completed is really important to me and particularly interested in trying to find those ways that we can streamline our processes, eliminate redundancies and just deliver a high quality product for the company.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. And are you mostly in office? Are you on-site a lot? How does that work?
Ian Kornfeld:Our engineering team is unique in the sense that I'd say by and large it's an office based role, but being that we are serving as those technical experts for construction, we do visit the field pretty often. We have our yards and our warehouses for materials. While my role is primarily office based now, the team as a whole, I would say is split, especially during construction season, closer to maybe a 70 five-twenty five or even closer to a fifty-fifty split.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. So you've got your steel cap boots in the car ready to go?
Ian Kornfeld:Yes, always.
Elizabeth Corner:You've been leading major gas transmission projects. How did you come to this leadership role in your career? And what would be your advice for others who are looking to step up in the pipeline sector?
Ian Kornfeld:Yeah, so early on I knew I wanted to take a path of leading others to some extent, but about five to six years ago the company underwent a, I'd say a modest reorganization that aligned our engineering resources on a regional basis with our asset teams. So previously we were an engineering org and an asset org, and we merged the two. So at the time I was serving as a sole contributor responsible for completing some of the final phases of several critical projects. As part of the transition though, I became more deeply involved in developing team guides, standards, best practices to support the new organizational structure, and this reorganization led to an opportunity for at the time what was called an engineering supervisor role. The role was not fully defined, it was very unique.
Ian Kornfeld:The company only really had two or three of these opportunities available and I recognized it was a chance to have a broader impact, drive some meaningful change, and help shape teams' direction. So I was fortunately offered the position and shortly after the COVID nineteen pandemic started, that position is what I assumed and it was very interesting and unique in the sense that it was a rapid shift to a full remote work setting and it was my first opportunity to lead a small team. So it presented its own challenges and how do you navigate a remote leadership style with the complex work that we do and really the collaborative nature that we need. I had to adapt my leadership approach to find the right balance, you know, prioritize clear and consistent effective communication in a virtual space. Obviously as we merge back into the office, shifting that back to a more in person connection as well.
Elizabeth Corner:Also a challenge.
Ian Kornfeld:Oh, yes. Coming from remote work and coming back into a face setting too, it took a little time to navigate that.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah. So you've done a lot of work on standardization and knowledge transfer. You spent a lot of time on Zoom and Teams. What does good knowledge transfer look like in a very busy engineering organization? What works, what doesn't work?
Ian Kornfeld:It's a great question that I've asked probably myself and others numerous times through those transitions. But I do believe a good knowledge transfer is when an individual just doesn't get the answer provided to them and accepts it, but questions it further. Our industry has a lot of nuances backed by code standards and research over years of operation and performance. But when an individual asks a question, an answer will be provided or can be found. Is there enough detail to satisfy their need?
Ian Kornfeld:Or more than likely, yes, but does it really sink in? And I think providing the feedback to questions that solicit follow-up questions or discussions and really makes the individual think, that's where the knowledge transfer becomes probably the best. One item I'm particularly keen on with that is summarizing data information in short documents or short blurbs. So we have lengthy standards, industry standards, company procedures and practices, but for an individual who's new to the industry or new to a company, I feel they can get lost in that. They get lost in the words, they don't know where to go, they don't know how to interpret it.
Ian Kornfeld:Some of the best knowledge transfers I've found have come from individuals who are experienced and saying, here's a four paragraph summary or a short guide that kind of lays the foundation for the topics or points the individual to more detailed documents. And you're ready for new individuals. I think that helps when I think you just give them here's a standard or here's a document to read. It gives them foundational knowledge, without context or further explanation or even images or seeing it, they can get lost in a trans translation, they can maybe misinterpret, and I don't think it is absorbed as well as providing a little more context at the start.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah, and in your role, presumably you're balancing things like schedule, budget, construction timelines, safety. Where do young engineers or engineers of any age misread the trade offs there? How do you make sure that you're balancing those bits correctly?
Ian Kornfeld:It's a great question and one that we bring up very frequently with anybody who joins the industry, who's not just to your point, just a new engineer, it could be any individual who's new to the industry as a whole. One of the biggest items where I think individuals underestimate is construction feasibility. And I know this because it was something early on in my career that I struggled with where you're taught, say by the book, you understand calculations or formulas or code, but you haven't seen. We always want to focus on the four aspects. It's always important schedule and budget.
Ian Kornfeld:You can easily interpret a schedule and a budget on a piece of paper, right? You see numbers, you see dates, you can follow those along. But when you're actively working through design and construction and safety, those are more abstract unless you've seen it. So to many, I think young engineers and new employees to the business as a whole or to the industry, they misinterpret what a constructible and safe item may be, and you could be thinking something is constructible, but you could be putting safety in the background. So one of the big items that I always look at through our design and through the team is how do we incorporate what we've learned and what we've seen and think about the safety and the constructability upfront.
Ian Kornfeld:And you're never going to make everybody happy, you're never going to be able to treat everything at the same level of detail, but as long as you're thinking about it, it helps for the future. Really try to drive that home with folks and you can get a lot of opinions through design and through construction and how do you navigate through those opinion based design elements is key. I think it's all about listening, it's all about interpreting and finding a good middle ground where you can explain why you maybe chose the path you did.
Elizabeth Corner:Yes, I think navigate is a very good word there. So you are active in YPP USA. Can you tell us what the younger professionals in the pipeline industry are excited about the future? What are they worried about?
Ian Kornfeld:The YPQ USA organization actually is a great backdrop for these questions and we're actually kicking off an initiative very soon to capture some more details pertaining to this. That's a question that we've asked the organization but also industry partners alike all seem to have very similar thoughts and questions about this and what can they do. From my take on it and from what I talk to folks about, I do think one of the stronger concepts that I hear that folks are most worried about is the shift in perspectives, and it's very difficult to define. It's more of a political landscape, environmental landscape, but when folks are so ingrained in hearing about, really hearing the news or the political setting of some of these discussions about large work in the industry, it can bring a very negative connotation to what we do. And unless you're in it, unless you're ingrained to do it and see it, most folks just go with what they hear.
Ian Kornfeld:So a new engineer entering into the industry just hears all about this and they don't know, they don't see, and it's really an eye opening experience for them how they learn and develop, how you get them to understand the work that we do, why it's so critical, how important it is, especially when we see in these storms and events that happen. What's keeping the homes heated and the lights on? So I get asked a lot about that. I get asked a lot about job stability and security. Obviously there's a big push for AI and what does that mean for the roles that we have?
Ian Kornfeld:And I tell them AI is great. It's a tool that we can use, but can AI deal with complex issues that involve valve maintenance or maintenance on our systems? Can it predict? Sure. Can it fix?
Ian Kornfeld:No. Those items that I hear most frequently and I think it's a lack of understanding, lack of appropriate knowledge and facts making it out to these individuals before they really enter the industry.
Elizabeth Corner:Great. I'll have to have you back on the podcast when the researchers come back in and we can talk about it.
Ian Kornfeld:That would be great. We're really eager so to see what our members feel.
Elizabeth Corner:Let's do some quick fire, shall we? The soundtrack to your commute or your working day, what are you listening to?
Ian Kornfeld:You know, I have a very short commute, unfortunate, but I am a big BPM fan So from Sirius I usually just listen to whatever's playing that day. I don't have any particular track in mind at the moment.
Elizabeth Corner:Yeah, that's fine. We don't need particular track. Do you have a mentor in the pipeline industry or in your family?
Ian Kornfeld:So a couple in the pipeline industry. I've met some great folks over the years through YPP actually, through the mentoring program and some of the other programs I've been a part of. I am the first in my family in the pipeline industry, you will, the first engineer actually to be that as well. Some of the best interactions I've had were with senior leaders of companies outside service territory. It's opened up such a wide view, right?
Ian Kornfeld:You're so narrowly focused on your role in the region that you're in, but just by talking to folks in other regions and what they do and how they do, it's incredible how much you can learn.
Elizabeth Corner:Next question is notes on your phone or notes in a notebook?
Ian Kornfeld:I was a big fan of handwritten notes when I first started and I still have those notebooks dating back. Each was a yearly notebook, Each was just detailed out from this date to this date. But in the last four to five years, I've switched to full digital. Yes, I've gone full digital.
Elizabeth Corner:And I'll ask you what I asked Mehdi. What is the advice that you would give yourself if you could go back and visit yourself on your first day in the pipeline industry?
Ian Kornfeld:I remember that day pretty well, and it was a nerve racking day. I changed industries front to back, I didn't know what to expect, and I think one of the items that I would tell myself is to not be afraid to ask the questions that nobody else is asking. And when I first started, there was a lot of individuals who had tons of experience in the industry. Some were heading towards retirement, others had a little more time. They come off very strong.
Ian Kornfeld:You get intimidated by them. When they see new folks come in, they're not super happy because they got to train or they got to teach and so on. But if you ask those questions, you show your interest, you show you care, and you show that you're willing to put in the work, it goes a long way. And a couple months in that fear lessened and I was able to break through and even some of the rough around the engines individuals, the ones who folks say stay away. If you approach them appropriately and show that you're willing to learn more often than not, they become a much different person.
Ian Kornfeld:And anybody entering industry, I would tell that too, that I have some stories that kind of open open your eyes and I look back and say those are the best stories because I learned the most.
Elizabeth Corner:That is some great advice. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Ian.
Ian Kornfeld:Oh, my pleasure. Yeah. I appreciate the time and appreciate the opportunity to talk about me, but more importantly, the industry.
Elizabeth Corner:Thanks to Mehdi Lashubi at SkipperNDT and Ian Kornfeld at National Grid for giving us a taste of life as a young pipeliner. You can find out more about Young Pipeliners International at youngpipeliners.com. Thanks for listening to the World Pipelines Podcast. Please subscribe so you don't miss an episode. World Pipelines helps oil and gas pipeline professionals stay informed about the midstream oil and gas sector, offering technical articles, regional briefings, project and contract news, and think pieces on pipelines all over the world.
Elizabeth Corner:Register to receive a print or digital copy at worldpipelines.com and search World Pipelines on LinkedIn to join our community.