Department
School
Expertise
Bio
Gunnar Lucko, Ph.D., M.ASCE is Ordinary Professor of Civil Engineering at Catholic University of America (CUA) and is Director of its Construction Engineering and Management Program, which is a specialization within the undergraduate and graduate studies in civil engineering. He has been a full-time faculty since 2005 and was promoted and tenured in 2011 and promoted in 2016.
He received his Doctor of Philosophy as a Vecellio Graduate Fellow from the Vecellio Construction Engineering and Management Program at Virginia Tech in 2003 and a Master of Science as a Fulbright Scholar in the same program in 1999. He also holds a diploma (Diploma-Engineer = Dipl.-Ing.) equivalent to a Master's degree with concentrations in structural and environmental engineering from Hamburg University of Technology in his native Germany.
His scholarship has been recognized with the 2017 Provost Award for Achievement in Research, the 2013 Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction of ASCE, and the 2011 Thomas Fitch Rowland Prize of ASCE (which he shares with Dr. Rojas) for their journal paper on validation methods. The School of Engineering awarded him the 2013 Charles H. Kaman Award for Research Excellence and 2010 Burns Junior Faculty Fellowship. He has also received the 2009 Provost Award for Teaching Excellence in Early Career Faculty and the 2008 Kaman Award for Teaching Excellence.
His research interest include mathematical modeling, analysis, and optimization of project schedules in conjunction with other aspects, e.g. costs and resource use, as well as construction equipment operations and economics, and engineering education. He has published almost 40 peer-reviewed journal papers and has peer-reviewed over 50 conference papers on these topics. A major focus of his work is the novel application of singularity functions, which originated in structural engineering, to construction management. His current work continues to expand the capabilities of these flexible functions.
He is Senior Specialty Editor and active reviewer of the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Past Chair of the Executive Committee of the Construction Research Council (CRC) in ASCE's Construction Institute and serves on technical committees of several conferences. From 2006 to 2009 he was principal investigator for a funded collaborative project of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and the Engineers Without Borders national capital chapter. Its unique student-centered team of undergraduate students, faculty, and industry assembled expertise in construction, structural, and earthquake engineering to develop a low-cost sustainable foundation damper system for structures in developing regions. The team then traveled to a community in rural El Salvador and successfully implemented the design in a health clinic building that now serves this community. He has also volunteered for CUA summer youth programs, e.g. Keys to Empowering Youth and Eye on Engineering. Since 2005, he is a biweekly mentor for a group of local minority high schoolers through the national Career Directions for Students in Architecture, Construction, and Engineering (ACE) Program.
Representative Publications
Lucko, G., Mitchell, Z. W. (2010). "Preparation of Incongruous Economic Datasets for Archival Data Analysis." In print, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.
Lucko, G., Rojas, E. M. (2010). "Research Validation in the Construction Domain: Challenges and Opportunities." In print, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management.
Lucko, G., Peña Orozco, A. A. (2009) "Float Types in Linear Schedule Analysis with Singularity Functions." Journal of Construction Engineering and Management135(5): 368-377.