About Keith Hampson
Keith Hampson, Senior Vice President of Global Rail & Transit - Business Lines at Aecom, has been active in discussions on construction industry research and collaboration. In a January 2025 seminar, Hampson discussed Australia's construction sector, noting that high labor costs driven by strong union engagement motivate a push toward automation and robotics. He also highlighted the Australian government's target of delivering 1.2 million homes over five years, which he said is reinvigorating interest in prefabrication and offsite manufacturing. Hampson emphasized the importance of international partnerships for advancing automation, digitization, and artificial intelligence in construction, and identified workforce skilling as a key challenge.
As immediate past president of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB), Hampson has outlined priorities for the organization. In a 2023 interview, he said his goals as president were to restore research at the center of CIB, reinforce member services, and establish the machinery to deliver those aims. He stressed the need for proactive research in the built environment, calling it "the core of human existence," and advocated for leveraging CIB working commissions on topics such as safety, information technology, and healthy cities. Hampson also noted that he personally endowed a CIB award to encourage early career researchers to engage with industry.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Keith Hampson's recent appearances.
Browse all interviews →
Transcript (2 segments)
I
Interviewer0:03
Let's give you the opportunity to set out your vision for CIB, not just in your presidency, but in the longer term, in Hong Kong, in the world.
K
Keith Hampson0:13
Building Congress 2019, hosted by Hong Kong Poly, was a great conference. When I was elected president of CIB for three years starting June 2019, I highlighted three goals: one was to restore research at the center of CIB; number two was ensuring that member services are reinforced at the center of CIB, through improved member services; and three was to assist in establishing the machinery to deliver items one and two. I'm confident that side of reshaping the organization is well advanced. On the other side, the role of students—building the research capabilities of the future, early career researchers who will become future commission or task group coordinators, publishers of documents, global research leaders, and lead the CIB board—has been reinforced in the new CIB. Under the leadership of Albert Chan as student committee chair, and with Michael Beam and yourself, we've been delighted at board level with the progress reinforcing the role of today's students being tomorrow's leading researchers and commission leaders. This is a serious stage of world history. The pandemic has made us rethink a whole range of things, but more than ever we shouldn't be sitting on our hands. We need to be proactive. In our particular context in CIB, for researchers in the built environment, we need to identify where we can help the future of the world. That might sound grandiose, but the future of the world is in our hands. Humans spend 90% of their time in the built environment—where they live, work, and play. The built environment is the core of human existence. Whether we're involved in working commissions that might include W99 safety and health in construction, it's pivotal to how we deliver products of the built environment: homes, buildings, transport, energy infrastructure. Or W78 information technology for construction—how are we stepping up our IT for delivering construction products and services more efficiently, informed by tested robust outcomes in the digital world, applied to better construction? Another example might be building healthy cities task group 86: how are that group's initiatives being leveraged in a post-COVID world? How are we shaping the research we're well positioned in, using our benchmarks, to make a contribution so that global recognition of the value of built environment research is crystal clear? In wrapping up, I want to highlight the opportunity for a return to normal—a better than normal—world. Building Congress 2022 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. As a member of the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre, RMIT has stepped forward to take this challenge. I thank our board member Ron Wakefield for taking on that challenge, and I look forward to the CIB and the broad built environment community coming together in June 2022 in Melbourne, driving forward the agenda of building our future.
