Stanford Construction Institute
The Stanford Construction Institute was launched in 1960 as one of Stanford's first Industrial Affiliate Programs to support enrichment of our Construction MS educational program by allowing us to engage practicing professionals from industry as consulting professors.
A key strength of our MS Construction Program is offering a unique blend of cutting-edge insights from the ongoing research of our full-time academic faculty and strong coverage of current and evolving industry best practices presented by a superb group of dedicated lecturers and consulting professors from industry.
Examples of the cutting-edge research that has enriched our program ahead of most of our competitors include Professor John Fondahl's research on the critical path method, Professor Clark Oglesby's research on construction safety, Professor Henry Parker's research on methods improvement in the 1970s, research by the Center for Integrated Faculty Engineering (CIFE) during the past two decades on Building Information Modeling and Virtual Design & Construction, research by Global Projects Center (GPC) over the last decade on innovative approaches for financing and governance of infrastructure projects, and ongoing research on new ways to measure and promote sustainability in buildings and infrastructure and on sensor and control networks to optimize the operation of interconnected intelligent buildings and infrastructure in a new “smart built environment.”
The Construction Program’s budget from the School of Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering Department covers only the costs of our full-time, academic faculty and program administrator. We value the practitioner input into our MS programs very highly, so we have always fund-raised from the industry to support the ongoing inclusion of the consulting faculty from industry who help to provide the broad-based range of topics that enable us to attract the very best students nationwide, maintain the relevance to industry of our academic programs and provide our students with knowledge that they can put to use immediately upon graduating.
Our industry faculty round out our degree program by teaching classes ranging from construction law and accounting to real estate development, building energy systems and labor relations. This unique blend of cutting-edge concepts, methods and tools, together with industry-grounded best practices, is delivered through the Sustainable Design and Construction programs, which attract strong applications from large numbers of the top students nationwide.
