Feniosky Peña–Mora
Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department
Columbia University
Room 628, SW Mudd, New York, NY 10027
Phone: (212) 854-6574
Fax: (212) 854-6467
feniosky@columbia.edu
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Feniosky Peña-Mora is currently the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC). He is responsible for over 1200 projects valued in excess of $15 billion, undertaken by over 1300 employees and 1320 consultants. He is on public service leave from his position as Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering, and Computer Science at Columbia University. Formerly, he was Dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University from 2009-2012. Before coming to Columbia, Prof. Peña-Mora spent six years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Associate Provost, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the civil and environmental engineering department, a center affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and a faculty affiliate at the Beckman Institute. He had previously served in the faculty of MIT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and has been a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, the University of Salford, and the University of Manchester as well as a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University in Great Britain, at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and Tsinghua University in China. He earned his Master of Science (M.S.) and Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) degrees in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1991 and 1994, respectively. He has earned an international reputation for his scholarship, teaching, research and engineering innovations. His current research interests include information technology support for collaboration in preparedness, response and recovery during disasters involving critical physical infrastructures. He also is a leader in change management, conflict resolution, sustainable construction, and processes integration during the design and development of large-scale civil engineering systems.

Dr. Peña-Mora is the author or co-author of more than 210 scholarly publications as well as holds six patents and a provisional patent. His publications have received the best paper award in numerous occasions including the ASCE Journal in Computing in Civil Engineering Best Paper Award (2015), ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering Best Peer Reviewed Paper (2015), ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management Best Paper Award (2011), and ASCE Journal in Computing in Civil Engineering Best Paper Award (1995). He has given keynote and plenary speeches at numerous conferences and symposiums, including the 2001 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposia, the 2003 American Society of Civil Engineers Symposium on Information Technology in Civil Engineering, the 2004 National Academies Convocation on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research; the 2010 International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality in Sendai, Japan, the 2010 International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction W78 in Cairo, Egypt, the 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering, the 2015 Symposium of the College of Dominican Registered Engineers (CODIA). He has also received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the FIATECH Engineering & Technology Innovation Award. He has also received the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize (2007), the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Award (2008), the ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal (2013), the ASCE Construction Management Award (2014), the Municipal Engineers of the City of New York 2015 Municipal Engineer of the Year Award (2015), and the 2016 International Outstanding Achievement Award on Business Management from the Chartered Institute of Buildings, UK. More recently, Dr. Peña-Mora has been elected to the Dominican Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Construction.

Since 1995, Professor Peña-Mora has been PI or co-PI on close to $10 million in grants, more than $6 million of which was allocated to his research group from both private and public sources. In addition, he raised more than $1.5 million dollars in angel investments for a high tech start-up developing advanced collaborative environments for globally dispersed large-scale engineering projects. He is a professional engineer registered in the Dominican Republic and has been a key figure in a variety of high-profile international projects and companies. He has consulted for both the construction industry and governments in various countries. He has held the position of Chief Information Technology Consultant on the Boston Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project (Big Dig), where he focused on information technology support for change management and process integration during the design and construction phases of the massive $14.8 billion ($24.3 billion total), two-decade long engineering endeavor.

   

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