Since 2015, the international competition "the ITA Tunnelling Awards" seeks and rewards the most ground-breaking innovation and outstanding projects in tunnelling and underground space use. This year the event took place in Miami in conjunction with Cutting Edge Conference of UCA of SME. After editions in Hagerbach (Switzerland), Singapore, Paris (France) and Chuzhou (China), the fifth ITA Tunnelling Awards moved to the United States of America for the 2019 event. The four previous editions of the ITA Tunnelling Awards received 333 entries and 139 nominations, rewarded 41 projects and personalities and gathered almost 1000 attendees.

 President of ITA, Prof. Jinxiu Yan stated: “ITA Tunnelling Awards is a yearly major event of ITA focusing on latest outstanding tunnelling projects, technical project innovation and technical product/equipment innovation, innovative underground space concept as well as safety initiative. For this year, we have received 71 entries worldwide and 34 of them are for the three categories yearly tunnelling projects, which means that many outstanding projects have been recently built worldwide.”

Through 8 categories and 1 Lifetime Achievement Award, the ITA Tunnelling Awards identifies and rewards major disruptive innovations and groundbreaking projects. This edition, the event took place in conjunction with the 8th Cutting Edge Conference.