Dr. Bras is the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a professor and the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Bras was a distinguished professor and dean of the School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. For 32 years prior, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was Institute faculty chair, head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and director of the Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory. He has served as an advisor to the National Science Foundation, the National Research Council and the NASA Advisory Committee, among others.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Puerto Rico. His awards include the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award Hall of Fame, AGU Horton Medal, NASA Public Service Medal, and the Clarke Prize, among others. He chaired a panel that supervised the design and construction of a multibillion-dollar project to protect the city of Venice from floods. He has published two textbooks, more than 230 refereed journal publications, and several hundred other publications.

Dr. Akinci’s research interests modeling and reasoning about information-rich histories of buildings and infrastructure systems, to streamline construction and infrastructure operations and management. She specifically focuses on investigating utilization and integration of building information models with data capture technologies, such as 3D imaging and embedded sensors to capture semantically-rich as-built histories and to support proactive operations and management.

Dr. Akinci is the recipient of the Professor of the year award from the ASCE Pittsburgh section, the CETI Outstanding Early Career Researcher award from FIATECH and Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE. She has best paper awards from Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and from Construction Research Congress, ISARC and ICCCBE.

Dr. Akinci has one patent, two provisional patents and over 70 journal publications and 100 publications. She co-founded and is the Chief Innovation Officer at LeanFM Technologies, which won 2017 Pittsburgh Business Times Innovation Award.

Dr. Fang is a former Vice President of CIB（International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction）and the current leader of CIB priority theme - Resilient Urbanization. He has been sitting on boards and committees of many international and national organizations of government, industry, and academics. He has been honored as Visiting Professors in Australia, Sweden, and the UK, and invited as keynote speakers for many international conferences such as CIB World Building Congress and Urban Transitions Global Summit.

Dr. Haas' research, teaching and consulting are in the areas of construction engineering and management systems. He has received several research and teaching awards. He serves on a number of editorial boards and on professional committees for organizations such as ASCE, NSERC, and IAARC. His research has been supported by numerous companies, by the Construction Industry Institute, and by agencies such as TxDOT, MTO, NSERC, NSF, and CRC. He is a member of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ASCE. He was elected to the US National Academy of Construction in 2013. In 2014 he received the CSCE Walter Shanly Award for outstanding contributions to the development and practice of construction engineering in Canada. In 2015 he received the ASCE Peurifoy Construction Research Award. In 2017, he received the University of Waterloo Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision.