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A lab is nothing without the people – and here are the smart real people associated with the smart digital lab.
Core Team
Dr. Roy C. Davies
Senior Technician / Teaching Fellow
Roy is a long time expert in Mixed Reality and Calm Technology. Trained as a Computer Scientist with aspirations to become a cognitive scientist and behavioral psychologist, the area of Virtual reality was the perfect marriage of the technical and human fields. Roy is a contemplative engineer with both academic and business competence who likes to solve technical and business problems and help other people solve their problems.
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Dr. Yang Zou
Senior Lecturer, Research Lead
Yang is a Lecturer with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland. Yang works with applying advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), e.g. Building Information Modelling (BIM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), sensing and visualisation, throughout the lifecycle of complex building and large-scale infrastructure systems.
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Dr. Alice Chang-Richards
Associate Professor
Alice is an Associate Professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland. Her main research interests include disaster risk reduction, climate change adaption, construction technology, construction automation, smart cities and smart housing.
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Dr. Hongyu Jin
Lecturer
Hongyu is an early career researcher with diverse research and teaching experience. He has been teaching several core units in construction management. His broad research interests cover public-private partnerships, sustainable infrastructure and construction project management.
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Nona Taute
Lecturer
Nona Taute attended Te Kura Kaupapa Māori ō Ruamata, a full-emersion Māori school, until he left Rotorua to begin his undergraduate in Civil Engineering. Upon completing his undergraduate, Nona commenced his PhD in which he would utilise both his engineering knowledge and his connection to mātauranga Māori. Nona aspires to create change in the field of engineering project management by introducing robust mechanisms from which to incorporate mātauranga Māori.
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Dr. Vicente Gonzalez (SDL Alumni)
Associate Professor, Research Lead and Founder
Vicente is now a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Digital Lean Construction, Faculty of Engineering – Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept at Alberta University, Canada. He was a staff member within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland since 2010, and founded the SDL. He actively conducts research in construction management, civil engineering and computing applications.
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Dr Vicente Gonzalez – The University of Auckland | University of Alberta
Dr. Robert Amor
Professor
Robert has spent over 30 years working on the application of computer science research in the architecture, engineering, and construction domains. Prior to his return to NZ in 2000 he spent 5 years in the UK developing Construction IT initiatives at the Building Research Establishment. This included the development of National and European-wide Internet-based information gateways. In NZ he has been part of the national BIM Acceleration Committee, he coordinates the CIB W78 working group on IT in Construction, and is Editor-in-Chief of the IT in Construction international journal.
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Dr. Cameron Graham Walker
Associate Professor
I came to the Department of Engineering Science in 1998, after completing my PhD in Mathematics. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015. My research interests are Network Optimization, Simulation and Statistical Modeling. I am a member of ORUA (Operations Research union Analytics), inside the Operations Research Group at The University of Auckland.
My area of research is computational analytics. I specialise in building models that make use of system measurements to understand the dynamics of those systems, and in many cases incorporate optimisation techniques to help decision makers improve the system performance.
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Associate Professor Cameron Walker – The University of Auckland
Dr. Subeh Chowdhury
Senior Lecturer
Subeh is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland. After completing her PhD, she has worked in industry on road safety, speed analysis and crash reduction studies as a consultant for Beca and Opus. Subeh works with policy making of Integrated Public Transport systems, and has a strong interest in equity with a focus on women’s barriers to the use of public transport, in particular their perception of safety. Further, she conducts research on the use of public transport by people with disabilities and is passionate about sustainable transport.
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Dr. Jiamou Lou
Senior Lecturer
My research interests lie in the intersection between theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Recently my research mainly focuses on the interdisciplinary area of computational social science and multi-agent systems.
My main research activities involve exploring social networks; topics of interests include interpersonal ties, influence, communities structures, information diffusion and social cohesion. I am also interested in pure and applied aspects of logic, algorithmic model theory, computational complexity and automata theory.
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Dr. Michael Justin O’Sullivan
Senior Lecturer
My main research interests are the application of Operations Research to complex systems, in particular the formulation of optimisation and simulation models and the development of advanced techniques for solving these models. Currently I am focusing on:
- improving health delivery services;
- modelling to inform government policy;
- building intelligent (computing and storage) clouds;
- conceptual modelling for simulation;
- developing innovative optimisation software; and
- simulating construction projects.
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Dr. Gary Raftery
Senior Lecturer
Gary is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland. He has two decades of research experience and has held positions at prestigious universities in Europe and North America. He has strong interests in advancing developments of durable and sustainable materials for a circular economy while delivering enhanced structural performance of elements and systems.
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Abhinaw Sai Erri Pradeep
Investigating the application of Blockchain Technology to improve information management in construction project management. Design, development and evaluation of a decentralised application prototype that leverages blockchain technology to enhance design liability control at the elemental level of BIM models, and improves the security of information exchange transaction records on construction projects.
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Dr. Enrique del Rey Castillo
Lecturer
Enrique obtained a Master of Engineering on structural engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain, his home town. He then joined the Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions (SAHC) master programme to learn more about advanced structural design, seismic actions and the behaviour of existing heritage buildings. This master is co-jointly taught at two universities in Europe, which brought him to live in Czech Republic and Portugal. His experience with the research project within the master programme motivated him to enrol at the University of Auckland to complete a PhD in seismic strengthening of concrete structures with Fibre Reinforced Polymers (FRP).