Chairholder

Dr. Aminah Robinson Fayek is a tenured professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. Since joining the Department in 1997, Dr. Robinson Fayek has become a respected member of Alberta's construction industry and an internationally recognized expert in fuzzy logic and fuzzy hybrid modeling techniques for intelligent decision support in the construction industry. From 2008 to 2020, she held the prestigious Ledcor Professorship in Construction Engineering, with a mandate to advance research, scholarship, and learning in construction. In 2017, Dr. Robinson Fayek began her tenure as Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Fuzzy Hybrid Decision Support Systems for Construction, and in 2019 she was appointed the first Director of the Construction Innovation Centre (CIC). The CIC brings together more than 30 engineering professors—including nine research programs supported by more than 50 partners in industry, professional associations, and funding bodies—to provide an integrated research platform that will deliver high-impact solutions to construction practitioners, developed in collaboration with industry partners.

In 2007, Dr. Robinson Fayek became the NSERC Associate Industrial Research Chair in Construction Engineering Management at the University of Alberta. As the Associate Chair, she developed a successful formula for collaborative research between the university and industry. Her research partnerships produced studies in subjective knowledge elicitation and consensus reaching, contractor prequalification, industry performance benchmarking, reducing field rework, reducing workforce absenteeism, and improving supervisory training. Her research during this term also led to the development of several valuable applications for industry, including a contractor prequalification tool, a foreperson skills development tool, and a workforce absenteeism tracking tool.

In January 2012, Dr. Robinson Fayek became the NSERC Senior Industrial Research Chair in Strategic Construction Modeling and Delivery (IRC in SCMD). The IRC specialized in developing hybrid intelligent decision support systems that incorporate fuzzy logic with other modeling techniques, such as artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and simulation. This research has changed the way the construction industry models operations and decisions, leading to more accurate and realistic representations of the expert reasoning process and the uncertainty involved.

In 2017, Dr. Robinson Fayek renewed her tenure as NSERC Senior IRC in Strategic Construction Modeling and Delivery for another term. Building on the success of previous terms, the IRC continued to advance the field of fuzzy logic by combining it with other artificial intelligence and simulation techniques. These newly developed methods, called fuzzy hybrid techniques, were then applied to a number of practical applications for solving strategic, delivery-related issues in construction in order to improve construction project outcomes and increase the profitability, technological sophistication, and competitive performance of the IRC’s partner organizations. The IRC in SCMD concluded at the end of 2022.