Speakers

Scott Earnest is the Associate Director for Construction Safety and Health at NIOSH. Prior to joining the Office of Construction Safety and Health in 2015, Scott was Engineering Branch Chief in the NIOSH Division of Applied Research and Technology for ten years.  Scott has over 70 peer-reviewed publications and technical reports. He began his career as an active-duty, commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, Corps of Engineers. He is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) and Certified Safety Professional (CSP) with M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and mechanical engineering.

Maren Roush is manager of standards development at A3 - the Association for Advancing Automation. A3 is North America’s largest automation trade association representing more than 1,200 organizations involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision & imaging, motion control & motors and related automation technologies. Maren joined A3 in 2022 after 26 years with a different standards development organization (SDO) and testing, inspection and certification (TIC) company, NSF International. At A3, she works with experts from around the world on ANSI and ISO committees to develop U.S. and international standards related to industrial robot safety.

Dr. Henning Roedel is the Robotics Lead at DPR Construction, an ever forward international general contractor specializing in technically complex and sustainable projects. He serves as an expert in robotics for DPR helping to source, pilot, and craft the implementation strategy of these new technologies across the company. Henning's career has spanned across all aspects of innovation to advance the construction industry for the needs of the 21st Century. He received his doctorate from Stanford University, where he invented a new type of concrete for construction on the Moon and Mars.

Jacob Carr is the Deputy Branch Chief for the Health Hazards Prevention Branch within the Pittsburgh Mining Research Division of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). He also serves as the Coordinator for the NIOSH Center for Occupational Robotics Research (CORR). Jacob earned his BS and MS degrees in Mining Engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his PhD in Energy and Mineral Engineering from Penn State. He has been a researcher at NIOSH for 14 years, during which time he has conducted or led research in the areas of mine illumination, proximity detection, collision avoidance, mining refuge alternatives, electromagnetic interference, and other topics related to the health and safety of workers.

Alexandra Medina-Borja is an expert on the effective design and analysis of human-centered smart/intelligent service delivery systems. She first came to NSF in 2012 as a program officer in the Directorate for Engineering and has held several leadership positions since. From 2014-2017, Alexandra managed the Partnerships for Innovation, Building Innovation Capacity Program focusing on Smart Service Systems. From 2018 to 2023, Dr. Medina-Borja had several roles in the STEM Education Directorate, including interim Deputy Division Director for the Division of Graduate Education and Executive Secretary for the STEM Education of the Future subcommittee among others. Dr. Medina-Borja is also one of the founding program officers who spearheaded the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier core research program since 2016. In April 2023, Dr. Medina-Borja became the program officer for Human-Centered Engineered Systems initiatives in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) in NSF’s Directorate for Engineering. Currently, she works with the M3X (Mind, Motor, and Machine Nexus) program and the cross-cutting Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program. 

Alexandra holds an M.E. and Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in Production of Materials Engineering from the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Sao Paulo, Brazil. 

Dr. Burcin Becerik-Gerber is a professor and Chair of Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and founder and the Director of USC Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS). During the last 15 years, her research focused  on advanced data acquisition, modeling, visualization for design, construction, and control of user-centered responsive and adaptive built environments. She pioneered a new field: Human-Building Interaction (HBI), which is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. She published her work in more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. Her work has received support worth over $14 million from a variety of sources, including the NSF, DoE, DHS and DoT and corporate sponsors. In 2012, she was named by the MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 35 technology innovators under the age of 35 (first civil engineering faculty to receive this recognition). She received the FIATECH Celebration of Engineering and Technology Innovation Award in 2018. The same year, she was awarded the Rutherford Visiting Fellowship by the Alan Turing Institute, UK’s national data science and AI institute. Between 2012-2019, she held the inaugural Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair. In 2020, she was appointed as a USC Viterbi Dean's Professor.  In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Construction. Since 2021, she serves on the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She received mentoring and leadership recognitions such as the Mellon Mentoring Award (2017) and an Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES) Fellowship (2021), which speak to her commitment to education and leadership in academia. In 2022, she received an Emmy Award as a co-producer of the documentary, “Lives, Not Grades,” which told the story of a novel course, she co-designed and co-taught, that focused on engineering innovation for global challenges.

Boyi Hu serves as an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Florida since 2018 Fall. He received his Ph.D. degree from West Virginia University majoring in Ergonomics in 2016 and worked as post-doc research fellow at Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health 2016-2018. His research interests are Ergonomics, Biomechanics, Safety Engineering & Human-Robot Interaction. His primary research interest is in identifying intervention pathways that influence and improve safety and health by using classical ergonomics principles augmented by emerging robotics technologies, wearable sensors, and artificial intelligence methods. The overarching goal of his research is to assist humans in living and working more independently, interacting with the environment and systems in a smooth manner, and achieving greater productivity in the foreseeable future. Since 2018, He has been the principal or co-principal investigator on nine competitive grants, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the Department of Transportation.

Dr. Jeelani leads the Construction Automation and safety (CAS) research group, at the Rinker School of Construction Management. His research focuses on construction safety, visual data analytics, and cognitive sciences to support the building of the next generation of safe and smart infrastructure. He joined UF in 2019 after completing his Ph.D. and MS in civil engineering from North Carolina State university. Over the years, he has worked on multiple research projects focusing on : (1) visual attention behavior of construction workers and its impact on their safety performance, (2) augmenting worker performance through the development of AI solutions, and (3) evaluating the health and safety impacts of automated and robotic machines in construction.

The outcomes of the research have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Dr. Jeelani developed the first personalized hazard-recognition training intervention for construction workers in 2016. The work was published in the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and awarded the best paper of 2017 and was nominated for the Norman medal. Dr. Jeelani has also developed the first algorithm to map real-world gaze fixations of dynamic human subjects and developed a novel vision-based automated hazard detection system for construction. The work will be instrumental in augmenting human worker’s performance in detecting hazards on construction job sites. Currently, Dr. Jeelani is working on multiple projects funded by NSF and the US Department of Labor investigating the health and safety implications of UAVs on construction job sites, and building the AI-based tools to improve safety performance in construction.

Dr. Masoud Gheisari is an Associate Professor in the Rinker School of Construction Management at the University of Florida. He leads the Human-Centered Technology in Construction (HCTC) research lab. His research focuses on the theoretical and experimental investigation of human-robot interaction in construction and technology-supported education innovation. He earned his Ph.D. in Building Construction (2013) from the Georgia Institute of Technology. To date, he has authored more than 110 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of virtual/augmented/mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) and safe human-drone interaction in construction.

His work has received support worth over $1.9 m in grants from external funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Labor, NIOSH’s Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR), and ELECTRI International. Dr. Gheisari is the recipient of the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) International Outstanding Researcher Award (2021), ENR Southeast’s Top Young Professional (2020), UF DCP Undergraduate Faculty Teaching Award (2019), BCN Nancy Perry Teaching Award (2019), Russell J. Alessi ELECTRI International Early Career Award (2018), UF DCP Faculty Research Award (2018), ASC Southeast’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2018), and ASCE ExCEEd Fellowship (2015). He also serves as an Associate Editor for ASCE’s Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering.