Feniosky Peña-Mora

Professor
William E. O'Neil Faculty Scholar

3129B Newmark

Phone: (217) 244-0187

Fax: (217) 265-8039

Email: feniosky@uiuc.edu

Personal website: http://cee.uiuc.edu/people/feniosky/

Feniosky Peña-Mora is an Associate Provost, Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as a Center Affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a Faculty Affiliate at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. Professor Peña-Mora earned a Master of Science (M.S.) degree in Civil Engineering and a Doctor of Science (Sc.D) in Civil Engineering Systems from MIT in 1991 and 1994, respectively. Before coming to the University of Illinois in 2003, Professor Peña-Mora worked at MIT as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of information technology and project management in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. He has also served as a visiting professor at Loughborough University in Great Britain and at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Professor Peña-Mora’s research interests include information technology support for collaboration in preparedness, response, and recovery during disasters involving critical physical infrastructures, such as the 9-11 terrorist attack and Hurricane Katrina. He is also involved in change management, conflict resolution, and processes integration during the design and development of large-scale civil engineering systems.  His research has been ground breaking in the field of construction engineering and management. Professor Peña-Mora’s development of the Interaction Space Theory for collaboration has led to improved performance among global construction management teams. In change management, he has identified the key components that influence the effectiveness of fast-tracking strategies in large-scale global construction projects and the dynamics that affect these strategies.  His research efforts in conflict resolution have identified the main drivers that define the context of conflict resolution during the development of large-scale civil infrastructure projects. 

Professor Peña-Mora is the author of more than one-hundred publications in refereed journals, conference proceedings, book chapters, and textbooks on computer-supported design, computer-supported engineering design and construction, as well as project control and management of large-scale engineering systems. His publication, “Design Rationale for Computer Supported Conflict Mitigation,” received the 1995 award for best paper published in the American Society Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. He is also the author of Introduction to construction dispute resolution (2002), an influential textbook in the field of Construction Conflict Resolution.  His research work has also resulted in three patents and two patents that are pending.

Furthermore, Professor Peña-Mora is the holder of the 1999 National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the 2000 White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award. More recently, he has won the 2007 ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. He has served as an Associate Editor for the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and editorial board member of the IEEE Internet Computing Magazine. He is currently a Specialty Editor for the ASCE Journal of Construction Engineering and Management and editorial board member of Automation in Construction, the Journal of IT in Construction and the Revista Ingeniería de Construcción.   He has been invited to give 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, and the 2004 National Academies Convocation on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research.

As an Associate Provost Fellow, Professor Peña-Mora’s campus-wide service assignments had included co-chairing the Chancellor’s Diversity Initiatives Committee, serving as Senior Associate Dean of the Graduate College, and representing the Graduate College on the Academic Council of Deans. In addition, he has served on the following committees of the Provost: the Promotion and Tenure Reform Ad-hoc Committee, the Ad-hoc Academic Advising Committee, the Enrollment Management Committee, the Academic Council of Deans Indirect Cost-Recovery Sub-Committee, the Chief Information Officer Search Committee, the College of Law Search Committee, and the Living and Learning Communities Advisory Committee. He has also served on many other committees, including the Graduate College Fellowship Board, the Graduate College Educational Equity Program Review Committee, and the Associate Vice-Chancellor of Student Affairs Search Committee. At present as Associate Provost, he serves as the campus lead for the Consortium on Fostering Interdisciplinary Inquiry, a consortium comprised of a select group of US research institutions that have exhibited leadership and innovation in supporting interdisciplinary activities in higher education. He also co-chairs the Chancellor’s Diversity Initiatives Committee, the Provost Ad-Hoc Committee in Institutional Entrepreneurship @ Illinois and the Provost Ad-Hoc Committee in Faculty ePortfolio and Promotion and Tenure ePortal.

Since 1995, Professor Peña-Mora has raised over $6 million dollars in research funding from both private and public organizations. 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 founded high-tech startup and consulting companies and has consulted for both the construction industry and governments in various countries in addition to the U.S. -- Argentina, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Japan. He has held the position of Chief Information Technology Consultant on the Boston Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project, where he focused on information technology support for change management and process integration during the design and construction phases of this massive $14.6 billion, two-decade long engineering endeavor.