MONDAY, MARCH 6 - LSC BALLROOMS C-D Keynote Speaker - Gerald (Jerry) Buckwalter
Gerald (Jerry) Buckwalter is the Chief Innovation Officer for the American Society of Civil Engineers responsible for helping to shape the strategic direction of ASCE. Additionally, he oversees the Future World Vision initiative, a forward-leaning strategic assessment and visualization project where ASCE is creating a virtual and interactive computer model to assess potential built environments 50 years into the future. Buckwalter also serves as President of his consulting firm, Strategy Essentials, specializing in business, market, and technology strategic planning. With over 35 years of experience, he came to ASCE from Northrop Grumman, where he was Director of Corporate Strategy.
Buckwalter earned a bachelor’s degree from Monmouth University and completed advanced coursework at George Washington University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council under both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. He is a member of the board of the Center for Public Policy Innovation and has also served on the board of the National Homeland Defense Foundation. He was the 2018 recipient of the ASCE William H. Wisely American Civil Engineer Award and was an Engineering News-Record Top 25 Newsmaker in 2019.
Keynote Speech – ‘Envision the Future’
We all intuitively know that massive change is coming with the 4th Industrial Revolution. From climate change to autonomous vehicles to pandemics, we are confronting a variety of environmental challenges, demographic shifts, and technological changes that will require a drastic rethinking of how we build, operate, and maintain all critical infrastructure systems – from healthcare to transportation to energy. Therefore, we are compelled to anticipate the coming changes and their effects on us.
But envisioning and planning for the future is difficult for every organization and industry. It is confusing, complicated, and disconnected from the present. As a result, it is often easier to focus only on incremental changes. We all need to learn how to ask the right questions, think critically, be bold and comprehensive in our planning, develop potential solutions, and collaboratively promote those solutions to change our culture, improve everyone’s quality of life, and help make the communities we serve healthier than what they are now.
This presentation focused on how we can get better at this. Buckwalter specifically talked about a construct described as “Provoke – Think – Act.”
The CHHS Research Day Keynote was supported by the Joseph Phelps Endowed Chair in the Department of Construction Management and the College of Health and Human Sciences Mary Scott Lecture Series.
MONDAY, MARCH 6 - LSC BALLROOMS C-D Faculty Lightning Talks
Each speaker took six minutes to present an overview of their research topic.
MONDAY, MARCH 6 - LSC BALLROOMS C-D Dean's Fellow Lightning Talks
Each speaker took six minutes to present an overview of their research topic.