Special Issue on Construction Engineering: Leveraging Project and Career Success

This is the second special issue dedicated to the Construction Engineering Conference. The first issue coincided with the inaugural conference gathering at Virginia Tech in 2011. It was published through the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management. We are as pleased and as proud now as we were then to present a series of papers that bridge construction engineering academics and industry practitioners. The need for increased collaboration between academia and the industry has not subsided, and will not subside in the foreseeable future. The construction engineering academic community faces the challenge of maintaining a balanced research portfolio of both basic and applied research. Both types of research are dependent on each other in the overall spectrum of our community and feed the cycle of continuous improvement in the engineering and construction industry’s performance. Furthermore, in an industry where industry practices are constantly evolving, what and how we teach students most also keep pace with industry changes.

The papers contained in this special issue follow three primary themes that mirror the theme of the overall 2014 Construction Engineering Conference. The first theme focuses on aspects of knowledge and career paths for future success. Many of these particular papers focus on the challenges, benefits, and lessons learned integrating industry knowledge into education and research at the universities. The second and third themes, sustainability and building information modeling (BIM), focus on specific areas of new knowledge that will continue to become increasingly critical for both the success of individuals and also the industry at large. Papers along these particular themes focus on how sustainability and BIM are not only being implemented in the industry, but how these relatively new practices are being addressed in university curriculums.

Most, not all, papers were written by a team of industry and academic authors. In many cases, this was the first opportunity for the authors to meet and work on a collaborative effort. It is the hope of the conference’s organizing committee that these individual collaborations will plant the seeds for broader industry/academic partnerships. A debt of gratitude is owed to the special issue author group for their thoughts and efforts in this overall body of work. Furthermore, we are especially grateful to the reviewers, who made sure that the papers maintained the standards for publication in the ASCE’s Practice Periodical on Structural Design and Construction.

The conference organizers express their gratitude to the following sponsors whose contributions have been instrumental in the success of the conference: the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded approximately 20 travel stipends for young researchers in construction engineering and external potential collaborators, who will attend the conference and actively participate in its workshop to develop a research agenda for construction engineering (NSF Award No. CMMI-1353242). The Construction Institute of ASCE has supported 12 travel stipends for doctoral students to attend the conference. The Associated General Contractors (AGC) Education and Research Foundation and The Beavers—the Heavy Engineering Construction Association have generously contributed to keep the conference affordable to all attendees.