SangHyun Lee, Ph.D., NAC, F.ASCE, the Robert B. Harris Collegiate Professor and John Tishman Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
Following his Ph.D., he taught at MIT and worked as a consultant at CRA International. In 2007, he joined the University of Alberta in Canada as an assistant professor before joining the University of Michigan in 2010. Lee leads the Dynamic Project Management Lab, which aims to maximize the performance of people through technologies like wearables, robotics, and automation. The lab is multidisciplinary, drawing from physiology, biomechanics, psychology, behavioral science, etc., to promote safe and inclusive construction and built environments.
Lee's research impact extends into the real world, having been applied and tested on real sites in collaboration with various companies. He is the founder and CTO of several startups, including Kinetica Labs, Inc., which provided sensorless (computer vision-based) motion capture for ergonomic risk assessment and was acquired by VelocityEHS, where he now serves as a machine learning scientist. More than 40,000 users have adopted this sensorless motion capture technology for ergonomic risk assessments, helping to reduce work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) by building the largest WMSD database. His research has earned 10 best paper awards, including the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering Best Paper Award (2014 and 2018). He has published more than 270 peer-reviewed articles, holds six U.S. patents, and has authored three books, with an h-index of 66 as of January 2025.
He is passionate about fostering and mentoring future generations, with his teaching extending beyond the classroom. His early open course on project management at MIT is arguably the first of its kind in this area and received significant viewership. Additionally, he has offered two online courses through the Coursera Online MasterTrack Certificate program, currently transitioning to the College of Engineering. He has supervised many graduate and undergraduate students who have gone on to secure prestigious positions globally in academia and industry.
Lee is an elected member of the National Academy of Construction and has held significant leadership roles, including chair of the ASCE Construction Research Council, chair of the ASCE Visualization, Information Modeling, and Simulation Committee, and serving on the Board of Governors at the ASCE Construction Institute. He also holds five editorial positions in leading journals, such as ASCE’s Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering.
He has received numerous awards, including the ASCE Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction, the ASCE Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize, FIATECH’s Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award, CII’s Distinguished Professor Award, the CSCE Stephan G. Revay Award, the Tom Waters Award, the Henry Russel Award (the highest honor the University of Michigan bestows upon junior faculty), the Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award, and the College of Engineering Service Excellence Award, among others.
He received both his master of science and his doctoral degrees from MIT in 2003 and 2006, respectively.
