Construction BUSINESS

The DIT School of Surveying and Construction Management has appointed Dr Bill East as Adjunct Professor of Construction Informatics. Dr East will assist the School with the formulation of its research policy, identify potential research projects and devise an engagement strategy to attract students to study Surveying and Construction Management at DIT.

Dr Bill East is a prolific construction management researcher whose four-decade career spans the areas of planning and scheduling, quality management, and building information modelling. His working life began in the early 1980s when he joined the US Army, Corps of Engineers to work as a Project Engineer in Washington DC. In 1986 he was appointed Adjunct Lecturer in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois, where he also obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering.

Dr East also held a research and program manager role with the US Army’s Engineer Research and Development Centre, where he led teams and projects tasked with identifying and solving resourcing problems in public facility acquisitions and operations. In 2014 he established his own consulting firm, Prairie Sky Consulting, and most recently worked at the University of Florida as Director of the COBie Academy.

His research contributions include a model for multi-project resource allocation for small-works projects, a framework to quantify the life-cycle impact of alternative building information management requirements, and a system-independent method that automatically adjusts building controls to actual operations.

As part of his Adjunct Professor duties, Dr East will deliver an annual lecture in DIT, the first of which will take place later this year and is called “From Convention to Exposition: An Industry in Transition”.