Dr. Renate Fruchter is the founding director of the Project Based Learning Laboratory (PBL Lab), lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Senior Research Engineer thrust leader of “Collaboration Technologies” at the Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE), at Stanford. She leads a research effort to develop collaboration technologies for multidisciplinary, geographically distributed teamwork, and e-Learning. Her interests focus on R&D and larger scale deployment of collaboration technologies that include Web-based team building, synchronous and asynchronous knowledge capture, sharing and re-use, project memory, corporate memory, and mobile solutions for global teamwork and e-Learning. In addition, she has established in 1998 a strong research effort focusing on the impact of technology on learning, team interaction, and assessment. She is the leader and developer of the innovative "Computer Integrated Architecture/Engineering/Construction Global Teamwork" course launched in 1993, at Stanford, that engages universities from US, Japan, and Europe.

Dr. Renate Fruchter has received her Engineering Diploma from the Institute for Civil Engineering in Bucharest, Romania (1981), her MSc. (1986) and Ph.D. (1990) from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. She has joined Stanford University in 1990.