Vineet Kamat, Ph.D., F.ASCE, Reg. 3, the John L. Tishman Family Professor of Construction Management and Sustainability, and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Kamat has made outstanding contributions to the advancement of construction engineering and management (CEM) through research and development of new technology, principles, and practices. His accomplishments include pioneering research in construction automation and robotics, where his work has developed new methods for construction robots to overcome workspace uncertainties and human-robot interaction barriers. His research has also resulted in fundamental contributions in the areas of real-time construction monitoring, context-aware infrastructure visualization, construction visualization in georeferenced augmented reality, and visual simulation of construction processes.
He is a charismatic educator with a distinguished record of motivating and promoting the aspirations of his students. His scholarship in construction has also resulted in novel pedagogical methods to teach construction. Kamat’s research has impacted CEM professional practice through a variety of entrepreneurial, scholarly, and other dissemination activities that include commercialization of developed technologies, collaboration with industry partners and national laboratories, archival publications in ASCE journals, research presentations and demonstrations at visible ASCE conferences and professional events, and widespread distribution of developed software tools.
Collectively, the dissemination and technology transfer activities resulting from Kamat’s work in CEM have contributed to improving the safety and productivity of visibility-constrained construction processes such as urban excavation and heavy lifting, improved the effectiveness and consistency of highway bridge inspectors in the conduct of condition assessment and rating of bridge infrastructure, provided a new theoretical foundation for innovations in construction automation and robotics by outlining key differences between civil engineering and other automated disciplines, and contributed to reducing the time and cost of constructed facilities through the use of visual simulation for planning and experimentation prior to actual construction.
Kamat’s scholarship in CEM extends into his wholehearted leadership in service to the professional community as well. He served as chair of the ASCE Construction Institute’s Construction Research Council (CRC) in 2011-12. This was preceded by a year’s service as vice chair and another year as secretary. In these roles, he planned, coordinated, and implemented all of the CRC’s primary professional development activities for current and prospective faculty members in the CEM research and education community. He currently serves on the editorial board of ASCE’s Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and has also guest-edited a special issue of the journal on construction visualization. He has participated as a technical and scientific committee member for several of the important conferences in the field of CEM, including the ASCE Construction Research Congresses. In all these professional leadership roles, Kamat has relentlessly promoted scholarship and outreach within the CEM community.
In summary, Kamat has a distinguished and sustained record of intellectual contributions in construction engineering and management, and of professional leadership and service to ASCE that have had a significant impact on the industry as a whole.
