Major NSF grant seeks to fill 'skills gap' in construction engineering

Walk past a construction job site and from the outside it looks as old school as ever: bulldozers digging, cranes lifting steel and glass, mixers pouring cement. 

Behind the scenes, however, the building industry in many cases draws upon many of the same data-driven technologies that have transformed health care, transportation and other sectors of the world economy.

Now, with help from a new $4.5 million National Science Foundation award, San Diego State University is partnering with the University of Virginia to help ensure graduate education keeps up with the new kinds of training and research needed to make use of these innovative digital, robotic and AI systems. The five-year grant is among the very first awarded through a new Research Traineeship institutional pilot program at NSF, and will create a certificate program and ultimately a new master’s degree at SDSU.

Reza Akhavian, principal investigator and an associate professor in the College of Engineering's Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering department, said the program seeks to fill a skills gap in the construction profession’s modern era.

“We need people or professionals in the construction industry who have interdisciplinary skills,” Akhavian said. 

“They understand civil engineering, they understand how the buildings are built and what are the processes that go into building a structure or any civil infrastructure for that matter,” he said. “But they also need to know how to work with data, and make sense of the data that is being collected on a daily basis on a construction job site.”

The program goes by the name Smart Construction, Infrastructure and Buildings through Education, Research and Cutting-edge Technology, a word salad assembled to generate an acronym (SCIBER-CT) which can be pronounced “Cyber City.” 

Akhavian expects to use the 2025-26 academic year for planning, with the first cohort of students recruited in the following year for an 18-unit certificate program. The master’s program would come later, around 2029 or 2030.

The award is one of the largest ever to SDSU from the NSF.

"We are proud of the groundbreaking work led by Dr. Reza Akhavian and his colleagues, which positions SDSU at the forefront of modernizing construction education,” said College of Engineering Dean Eugene Olevsky. “Through SCIBER-CT, SDSU College of Engineering students will not only master the fundamentals of civil engineering but also gain hands-on experience with AI, robotics, and immersive technologies - skills that are essential for the next generation of leaders transforming the built environment." 

SCIBER-CT seeks to capitalize on a transformation in construction that pulled back from a historic resistance to change, upping its game to the digital and AI realm, especially in the “meticulous attention” that Akhavian said must be applied to scheduling, estimating, planning, and other aspects of preconstruction.

“This program targets this goal (of) trying to develop a workforce, and train a workforce who knows construction, who knows civil engineering, who also knows advanced technologies such as AI and robotics and immersive technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality,” Akhavian said. 

Another goal is to increase diversity as construction continues to move beyond its historic reliance on males capable of tough manual labor. Akhavian said the ability to take full advantage of advanced technology opens the workforce to more individuals who are “not just working with (heavy) materials, rather you're dealing with more technology as a middleman between you and maybe construction materials and things.”

Similarly, he said, new engineering should be able to improve construction workplace safety, perhaps weeding out dangerous or repetitive work that can be outsourced to robotics.

Master's program

Over the five years of the grant, the program projects to train 135 master’s students, including 31 funded trainees.

Akhavian’s co-PIs at SDSU are associate professor Christopher Paolini and professor Junefei Xie (both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), and assistant professor Zahra Nili Ahmadabadi (Department of Mechanical Engineering). 

Their partners at the University of Virginia Engineering are professors Jonathan Goodall and Somayeh Asadi, and associate professor Arsalan Heydarian (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering). Goodall serves as director of the UVA Link Lab, a multidisciplinary center of research on cyber-physical systems (CPS) including robotics and smart cities. Goodall said the lab recently completed a previous NRT project that involved nearly 100 Ph.D. and master’s students.

“UVA has deep expertise in the adoption of advanced technologies within civil and environment engineering,” Goodall wrote to SDSU NewsCenter, “highlighted by faculty in the Smart Cities research theme in Link Lab.”

He added, “Along with our colleagues at SDSU, we are excited to build new opportunities for students at both institutions to gain practical and needed skills in smart construction, infrastructure, and buildings.“

Construction industry partners are Clark Construction and Whiting-Turner; also in the project is Azbil Corp., which works in industrial automation and control.

The award to SDSU and UVA is one of the first three to be made through NSF’s National Research Traineeship Institutional Partnership Pilot (NRT-IPP) program. The program was created in 2024 as a collaboration with academic institutions to train graduate students for a wide range of STEM careers by offering grants to innovative, interdisciplinary educational projects.

It also is among a total of 15 new NRT awards totaling $45 million announced last month. Other topics addressed in this year’s awards include nursing, agriculture and sustainable uses of water and land.

An independent agency of the federal government, NSF has been supporting fundamental research and education in science and engineering since 1950.