About me
My research
Every job site today runs on more technology than the last one: BIM, digital twins, sensors, robotics, and automation. None of it works unless all of it agrees on the same truth. My research focuses on closing the gap between the digital models we design and the physical work that actually happens on site or on the production floor, so that trust holds up as construction becomes more digital and automated.
Before becoming a researcher, I spent over a decade in construction management, cost estimating, and BIM/VDC delivery across the U.S. and Latin America, watching that trust break down project after project: a well-coordinated model on the screen, and a build that quietly drifted from it once real work started. As automation takes on more of the actual building, having reliable information stops being a nice idea and becomes the thing that keeps a job site safe, on schedule, and defensible when something goes wrong.
My mission is to make construction data trustworthy enough to act on in real time, using open standards so the people, systems, and technologies involved in a project can work from the same information.
This touches everyone on a project, not just the software: field crews and automated equipment executing the work, project managers and quality teams verifying it, technology providers and standards bodies connecting it all, and the students I bring into this work. In practice, that means fewer surprises during inspection, less rework from information that falls out of sync, and automated systems people can trust to build correctly, not just quickly.
My vision is to make the built environment more connected, transparent, and trustworthy, so digital information can keep pace with physical work, problems can be identified as they emerge, and the industry can build and operate more efficiently.
The roots of my passion for research
I didn’t start in a classroom. I started on a job site, watching a signed-off plan quietly fall apart the moment real work began. For over a decade before returning to school, I worked in construction management, cost estimating, preconstruction, and BIM/VDC delivery across the United States, Honduras, Chile, and Guatemala, and the same problem kept repeating on every project. Closing that gap, between what’s designed and what’s built, became the question I couldn’t stop chasing: first as a practitioner, and later through an independent BIM/VDC consulting practice serving construction organizations across the U.S. and Latin America.
To chase it properly, I came back to the University of Florida’s Rinker School for a Master’s in Construction Management under Dr. R. Raymond Issa. There, I developed a way to test a robotic construction process in simulation before putting it into practice, helping engineers see whether an idea would work before committing to the real equipment and materials. That project, now published in Automation in Construction, became an important early contribution to the questions I continue to explore in my Ph.D. Today, my work spans digital twins, automation, interoperability, and the broader digital transformation of how we design, build, and operate the built environment.
Beyond research
Outside of research, music has always been a big part of my life. I’m a singer-songwriter and guitarist, and more recently I’ve been exploring writing books and storytelling. My wife and I are also exploring permaculture and food-forest design in our native Honduras, an interest that reflects our shared curiosity about nature, place, and how things grow.