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Director of PBL Lab

Renate Fruchter

Director of PBL Lab
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 received her Civil Engineering Diploma from the Institute for Civil Engineering, Bucharest, Romania. She received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Her R&D focuses on collaboration technologies in support of cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed teamwork in education and corporate settings. Over the years her research team developed and deployed innovative collaboration technologies for virtual team building, synchronous and asynchronous knowledge capture, sharing and re-use, project memory, corporate memory, and mobile solutions for global teamwork and e-Learning. She is a designer of physical and virtual interactive learning and workspaces. She studies the relation between technology-people-place-process. These studies focus on the impact of technology on learning, engagement, knowledge work productivity, emergent work practices and processes, team dynamics, and assessment. She is the developer of the innovative "Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) Global Teamwork" course launched in 1993 engaging university and industry partners worldwide. Her latest projects focus on: (1) big data analytics and visualization towards harmonizing occupant well-being and building sustainable performance; and (2) accelerating creativity and engagement in global teamwork through VR, AI, and parametric modeling.

Education

Ph.D., Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, Civil Engineering (1990)
M.Sc., Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, Civil Engineering (1986)
Engineering Diploma, Civil Engineering Institute Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania, Civil Engineerin (1981)