Researcher Profiles

Associate Professor Rick Best

Associate Professor Rick Best is also the Head of Department for construction-related courses in the School of Sustainable Development. His PhD thesis was based on an extensive study of international construction cost comparisons. On the basis of this work he has been employed as a consultant to the World Bank and he is currently engaged in work that will produce a new methodology for the collection, validation and analysis of construction cost/price data from more than 170 countries. He has co-written and edited three books and is currently co-editor of a major refereed journal. He chairs two committees on behalf of professional bodies and is chair of the Australasian University Building Educators Association. He has published regularly in journals and through conferences with a number of his published papers dealing with aspects of international construction comparisons.

Professor Craig Langston

Professor Craig Langston holds a chair in Construction and Facilities Management. He has made significant contributions to scholarship in the building and construction industry over the last ten years. This includes four books published by Butterworth-Heinemann and Elsevier, several book chapters, guidelines for life cycle costing practice in Australia developed via a research consultancy with the Public Works Department of NSW, the production of three software packages used by professional firms and educational institutions, and numerous conference presentations both in Australia and overseas. He has published in well-recognized refereed journals such as Construction Management and Economics and has served on several editorial boards, including as editor-in-chief. His PhD developed a new approach to the calculation of time equivalence in discounting via the inclusion of affordability considerations linked to predicted changes in living standards. He holds the office of Associate Director (Research) in the Institute of Sustainable Development and Architecture. Professor Langston is currently first chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Linkage grants investigating (1) the strategic assessment of adaptive reuse opportunities and (2) making better decisions about built assets: learning by doing.

Professor Jim Smith

Professor Jim Smith holds a chair in Urban Development. He is a quantity surveyor/building economist with many years experience in private practice, and local and state governments in Australia and the United Kingdom. He has authored/co-authored a number of books on construction/building economics which are widely used in universities in Australia and the UK. He was in the team that gained an ARC Discovery Grant on construction rework in 2004 (completed in 2006). The prevention of design and construction problems that significantly affect the time and cost of projects was the major focus of that research. He is presently involved in an ARC linkage grant (2009 to 2012) for Making Better Decisions about Built Assets: Learning by Doing, which will develop a model for making better decisions about built assets. His PhD focused on developing a model for strategic client briefing and he has a continuing research and practice interest in project initiation, construction economics, construction procurement and public-private partnerships. He is Associate Director (Teaching and Learning) in the Institute of Sustainable Development and Architecture.

Adjunct Professor Jim Meikle

Adjunct Professor Jim Meikle is a consultant based in the UK. He has over forty years experience as a quantity surveyor and cost researcher and more than twenty years experience investigating, collecting and analysing construction costs for Eurostat. He has published a number of papers dealing with industry comparisons under his name and more extensively under the banner of the company for which he worked for many years (Davis Langdon Consultancy). More recently he has worked as an independent consultant for Eurostat and others and he is currently leading the work for the World Bank described above.

Dr Stephen Gruneberg

Dr Stephen Gruneberg is a Reader at the University of Westminster having previously been on the academic staff at both the Bartlett School (UCL) and the University of Reading. He has authored and co-authored a number of books on construction economics. More recently he has researched and published in the area of international comparisons; in the past year he has produced three international reports for KPMG on global infrastructure trends. His current research is concerned with international construction industry performance comparisons.

Paul Moore

Paul Moore is an Associate at EC Harris, a major UK quantity surveying firm with offices in more than 30 countries. He heads the Cost Research Department. A Chartered Quantity Surveyor, he has worked in the field of cost research for most of his professional career including working for the Building Cost Information Service of the RICS. At EC Harris he is responsible for the database of construction costs. Recent external commissions have included a number of international benchmarking exercises. He prepares a number of publications which are published both internally and externally on the EC Harris web site, the most notable being the annual International Building Cost book.

Professor Kuldeep Kumar

Professor Kuldeep Kumar is Professor of Economics and Statistics in the School of Business. His role in the centre will be to advise on methodology with a particular emphasis on statistical methods and analysis.

Associate Professor Gulasekaran Rajaguru

Associate Professor Gulasekaran Rajaguru is Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Business. He brings a strong record in econometrics to the centre having published extensively in areas such as time series analysis that have particular application in comparative research. He provides an invaluable theoretical foundation for the applied economics research that is the focus of the centre.

Gary Emmett

Gary Emmett is in-house construction economist with Turner & Townsend, a global supplier of construction cost and management consulting services. With specific experience across general construction, energy and the mining sectors Gary conducts construction cost research across Australia and internationally. He is particularly interested in drivers of construction costs such as labour, building materials, property markets and how economic developments affect these. He follows price trends and prepares research articles and indices of construction cost movements and likely movements in future costs. These are used by major resources companies and construction contractors in preparing their project cost estimates. He has an MA (Hons) in Economics from Edinburgh University, and a Graduate Certificate in Property Economics from QUT.

Gerard de Valence

Gerard de Valence is a Senior Lecturer in the School of the Built Environment, in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. He is has been Director of the Postgraduate Property course since 2006, and previously was Director of the Facilities Management course. Prior to becoming an academic in 1992 he had ten years experience as an analyst and economist in the private sector doing research on the property, building and construction industries for the Australian Stock Exchange, the Property Council of Australia and the NSW Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry. e has a long-standing interest in industry performance and development, and worked on industry policy in the 1990's with both the Australian Construction Industry Development Agency and the NSW Department of Public Works and Services. He was a consultant for DIST on the Building for Growth construction industry policy and the 2002 Cole Royal Commission into the industry.

His research has broadly focused on issues around the structure, conduct and technological trajectory of the building and construction industry, with over fifty refereed papers and book chapters published. He was co-editor with Rick Best of the three volume Building in Value series of books published between 1999 and 2003: Pre-design Issues, Design and Construction, and Workplace Strategies and Facilities Management. As Coordinator between 2003 and 2011 of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) Working Commission on Building Economics (W55) he was a leader of the largest research group in the field. In 2012 Taylor and Francis published a new book he edited Modern Construction Economics: Theory and Application.