2026
January 2026: Awarded the Scholarly Excellence Award - Early Career by the College of Architecture.
January 2026: Serving as Poster Session Co-chair and Organizing Committee member for ACM BuildSys in Banff, Canada
January 2026: Serving as Poster Session Co-chair and Organizing Committee member for the ASCE Construction Research Congress (CRC) in San Antonio, TX.
January 2026: Serving as Track Co-chair for the International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE) in South Korea.
2025
December 2025: First PhD student from HIBE lab, Hussein Al Jebai graduates. Congratulations Hussein!
December 2025: Hussein Al Jebaei successfully defended his Ph.D. in Construction Science, completing his research on the co-optimization of comfort and energy in buildings.
November 2025: Co-organized the 2nd ADIF Industry Workshop at TAMU, driving asset data and systems interoperability.
October 2025: Received the Montague - Center for Teaching Excellence Award.
October 2025: Dr. Aryal was as a panelist on how AI is transforming research and teaching at the COA showcase.
October 2025: Dr. Aryal presented on how to scale offsite construction for disaster recovery during the COA showcase.
September 2025: Joined the College of Architecture Research Council AI Task Force.
June 2025: Dr. Aryal presented research on a real-time multimodal sensing system for 3D printed construction at the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction (ISARC) in Montreal, Canada.
May 2025: The HIBE lab secured a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Track M for the TANDEM project, focusing on tensegrity-based assistive exosuits (PI: Dr. Chuma Nnaji; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Dr. Jay Kim).
June 2026: Appointed as Faculty Advisor for the Nepalese Student Association (NSA) at TAMU.
May 2025: Awarded an internal grant from the Construction Industry Advisory Council (CIAC) for the VISIT-MR mixed reality training project (PI: Dr. Gilles Albeaino; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Jonathan Houston).
January 2025: Received the Teaching Excellence Award - Early Career from the College of Architecture.
2024
December 2024: Secured a grant from CIAC to develop an AI-driven immersive platform for advancing cultural competency in construction (PI: Dr. Minerva Bonilla; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Dr. Chuma Nnaji).
September 2024: Secured a grant for the Disaster Recovery Alternative Housing Study (PI: Dr. Julie Hartell; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Dr. Peter Keating, Dr. Petros Sideris).
September 2024: Secured a grant from the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) for digital twin-based semantic interoperability technology (PI: Dr. David Jeong; Co-PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal).
September 2024: Awarded funding by the TAMIDS Early Career Collaboration Program to develop an energy digital twin of the TAMU campus (PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal; Co-PI: Dr. Xinyue Ye).
August 2024: Appointed as Associate Editor for the journal Urbanization, Sustainability and Society published by Emerald.
May 2024: Hussein Al Jebaei presented research on dynamic personal thermal comfort-based temperature setpoint controls at SimBuild 2024 in Denver, CO.
July 2024: Attended the ASCE EXCEED Teaching Workshop
August 2024: Recieved $5,000 worth of Google Cloud Research Credits.
Spring 2024: Dr. Aryal presented a black-box model for predicting HVAC energy consumption and PCM states at the ASCE Construction Research Congress (CRC) in Des Moines, IA.
2023
October 2023: Co-organized the "Harnessing Digital Transformation through Asset Data and Systems Interoperability" industry workshop at TAMU.
July 2023: Participated in the NSF CMMI Game Changer Academies Spring 2023 cohort.
June 2023: Hussein Al Jebaei presented his research on Phase Change Materials (PCM) in the 2023 ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering (i3CE) in Corvallis, OR.
May 2023: First MS student from HIBE Lab, Chintan Vijay Vora successfully graduated with his M.S., defending his thesis on stakeholder perception of robot adoption in construction.
April 2023: Secured an funding from TxDOT to develop an Artificial Intelligence tool for identifying potential change order items (PI: Dr. David Jeong; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, John Haberman).
April 2023: Awarded a PRISE (Panther Research and Innovation for Student Enhancement) joint research grant with Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) titled "Supporting Low-Income Communities Make Customized Home Energy Retrofit Decisions Using Artificial Intelligence" (Co-PI with Dr. Rambod Rayegan).
January 2023: Received a grant from CIAC to develop a framework assessing human-exoskeleton systems (PI: Dr. Chuma Nnaji; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Dr. Xi Wang).
2022
September 2022: Awarded research funding by Shell to investigate open and interoperable data standards for asset-intensive industries (PI: Dr. David Jeong; Co-PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal).
August 2022: Developed and launched the new graduate course, COSC 689: Data Science for the Built Environment.
March 2022: Received a TAMIDS Course Development Grant for teaching applied data science (PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal).
March 2022: Organized a TAMIDS-supported outreach workshop on "Sensors for the Built Environment" for TAMU students.
2021
August 2021: Developed and launched the new undergraduate course, COSC 489: Intro to Data Science for the Built Environment.
July 2021: Awarded a grant by Tran-SET for the development of a robotics and automation roadmap for road construction (PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal; Co-PI: Dr. Chao Wang).
January 2021: Named a 2021 Texas A&M Institute of Data Science (TAMIDS) Career Initiation Fellow.
January 2021: Awarded a Presidential Transformational Teaching Grant (PTTG) to teach data science to students without programming backgrounds (PI: Dr. Ashrant Aryal).
January 2021: Received a Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) grant to research novel energy-saving eco-friendly concrete materials (PI: Dr. Young Rak-Kim; Co-PIs: Dr. Ashrant Aryal, Dr. Juan Carlos Baltazar).
2020
August 2020: Recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer for the journal Automation in Construction.
August 2020: Officially joined the Department of Construction Science at Texas A&M University as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor.