Vicente Gonzalez-Moret, PhD, M.CSCE, M.ASCE
Faculty of Engineering - Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept
Pronouns: he/him
Personal Website: https://www.iht-lab.com/
Contact
Hal Kvisle Professor in Engineering Project Management and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Digital Lean Construction, Director Strategic Projects Insight Centre in Engineering (SPICE)
Faculty of Engineering - Civil and Environmental Engineering Dept
- vagonzal@ualberta.ca
- Address
-
6-289 Donadeo Innovation Centre For Engineering
9211 116 StEdmonton ABT6G 2H5
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
Construction Engineering Lean Construction 4.0 extended reality (XR) technologies digital twinning computer simulation and modelling serious games AI BIM Cross-Disciplinary Engineering
About
PhD, Construction Engineering and Management, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 2008
ME, Construction Engineering and Management, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 2004
BE (Hons), Construction Engineering, Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile, 1999
Research
Vicente holds the inaugural Hal Kvisle Professorship in Engineering Project Management in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. In October 2022, just three months after arriving in Canada, he was awarded a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Digital Lean Construction, one of the highest research distinctions available to faculty at Canadian universities, which he continues to hold. He also serves as Director of the Strategic Projects Insight Centre in Engineering (SPICE), established through the $3-million gift supporting the Hal Kvisle Professorship. Through research and collaboration with industry partners, SPICE develops and shares best practices with industry and government, and integrates these insights into the engineering curriculum, connecting classroom learning with real-world project delivery.
Before joining UofA, Vicente served as a faculty member at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) for more than 12 years and continues to hold an Honorary Academic appointment. His research interests are at the interface of Construction Engineering and Management and Computer Science, pioneering the Lean Construction 4.0 concept. Vicente has also worked heavily on the application and advance of extended reality technologies, computer simulation and modelling, BIM, AI (e.g., machine learning), meta-heuristics and soft computing (e.g., evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimisation), digital twinning, and serious games on construction engineering and management, civil engineering, education, safety, and quake/tsunami/fire evacuation problems. He has secured CAN$64.7 million in research and teaching grants, and the largest "single" corporate sponsorship in the history of the University of Auckland. At the University of Alberta, he has secured CAN$5.3 million as PI and Co-PI to date.
Vicente is a prolific author accounting for 231 publications including 1 book (Lean Construction 4.0: Driving a Digital Revolution of Production Management in the AEC Industry. London, UK, Routledge [Taylor & Francis Imprint]), 8 book chapters, 109 journal papers, and 113 peer-reviewed conference papers. Vicente has also curated 7 conference proceedings and 4 journal special issues in his career. In 2015, he also founded and led the Smart Digital Lab at The University of Auckland, a CAD$1.0 million+ laboratory focused on digital and smart technologies applications to solve human and engineering problems, with 15 University of Auckland faculty and 9 international universities associated with it developing joint research. At UofA, he led the establishment and co-founded the Infrastructure and Human Tech lab (https://www.iht-lab.com/), which encourages students to develop research with potential of commercialisation, and the first ASCE student chapter in Alberta.
He is Deputy Editor of Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management (ECAM), serves on the editorial board of Advanced Engineering Informatics, and is an Associate Editor of the Lean Construction Journal. He is also an active member of international construction engineering and management organizations (e.g., Former General Secretary of the International Group for Lean Construction, BOD member IAARC, ExCom ASCE/CRC), not-for-profit local construction organizations promoting the transformation of the Canadian construction industry (e.g., Founding Board of Directors, Lean Design and Construction Canada), and not-for-profit societies serving Indigenous children, youth, and families in Edmonton (former member of the Board of Directors, Bent Arrow). He has supervised to completion over a hundred undergraduate and graduate students including 88 BE(Hons) final projects and theses, 10 Master theses and 16 PhD’s theses, as well as 2 Postdoctoral fellows. Currently, he supervises 8 PhD students (New Zealand and Canada).
Vicente is also an entrepreneur, having founded two startup companies in New Zealand and expanded his entrepreneurial activities to Alberta, Canada, through SenseHuman.AI and Visio Contech. Both ventures harness artificial intelligence to enhance monitoring systems with semantic understanding, enabling them to interpret observations in context and deliver robust actionable insights. Their technologies strengthen situational awareness for workers and intelligent systems, supporting safer, more effective decisions across a range of engineering applications and industries.
Announcements
1) Personal research group: Infrastructure and Human Tech (IHT) Lab
2) González, V.A., Hamzeh, F., & Alarcón, L.F. (Eds.) (2022). Lean Construction 4.0: Driving a Digital Revolution of Production Management in the AEC Industry (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003150930
Book available here:
https://www.amazon.ca/Lean-Construction-4-0-Revolution-Production/dp/0367714205
Full CV here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e1e8a3r9je8zdk7sk1a9y/CV_VGM_January_-2026.doc?rlkey=whxeezpoa70hjukltkw9a06qf&dl=0