Editor’s Note

Dr. Eddy M. Rojas is an associate professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of Construction Management and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). He joined UW in 2001 and currently serves as executive director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Construction Research and Education (PNCCRE). PNCCRE is a state-of-the-art research center that encompasses three laboratories: Virtual Construction, Methods and Materials, and Construction Education. Before joining the faculty at UW, Dr. Rojas was an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering at the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). Dr. Rojas received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering and an M.A. degree in economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He also holds a Licenciatura in civil engineering from the University of Costa Rica.

Dr. Rojas’s research interests include (1) modeling, simulation, and visualization of construction engineering and management operations; (2) construction economics; and (3) engineering education. His research efforts have been supported by government agencies and industry organizations including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Army, the Construction Industry Institute, ELECTRI International, and the New Horizons Foundation. He is also the developer and facilitator of the Virtual Community of Construction Scholars and Practitioners, an academic networking site that supports the advancement of construction scholarship in a collaborative environment. In the past few years, Dr. Rojas has been actively involved in the development of situational simulations in the construction domain, both for training purposes and as a means of providing synthetic testbeds for research validation.

The Department of Construction Management at the University of Washington was founded in 1963. The master’s degree program was developed in 1994 with the objective of preparing individuals for middle management positions within the construction and related industries. The master’s program has an enrollment of approximately 50 students. Currently more than, 100 of its alumni hold top management positions in construction and construction-related industries, including entrepreneurs who have established their own construction companies. In 2003 the department, together with the other academic units in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, began offering a collegewide interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in the built environment. The Ph.D. program provides students with a common core of substantial, integrated knowledge concerning the multifaceted built environment and then offers areas of specialization in discrete fields of knowledge and practice. The collegewide Ph.D. Program has an enrollment of approximately 25 students.