Program Director, Construction Sector

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There remains significant challenges for Canada to successfully realize its international climate commitments. One such challenge is that the Canadian built environment and construction sector is a significant producer of GHG emissions - from the production of building materials such as concrete and cement to the heating, cooling, and maintenance of existing buildings. Successfully reducing GHG emissions in this area will require a paradigm shift in construction technology, practice and regulations. This paradigm shift requires the right tools and skilled resources to be in place, along with a wide-scale adoption of new technologies, practices and regulations across the industry. This challenge is significant for the construction sector: with more than 14.5 million existing residential and commercial buildings, Canada would need to retrofit one building each minute to achieve its targets for GHG emission reductions in this area by 2050.

We are looking for a Program Directorto lead the Construction Sector Digitalization and Productivity Challenge Program,to support the transition of Canada’s construction sector as it strives to increase productivity and reach the 2050 climate change goals. The Program Director is expected to collaborate and synergistically align the program to deliver the outputs needed by industry to commercialize new low-carbon technologies that lever digitalised construction and performance-based codes. Further, they are expected to collaboratively work with teams within the Built Environment Regulations and Specifications Resource Unit to effectively and fully lever deployment paths including, but not limited to NRC mandated activities, the National Master Construction Specifications, Canadian Construction Materials Centre, and the National Model Codes, which Codes Canada publishes on behalf of the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes. The Program Director would share our core values of Integrity, Excellence, Respect and Creativity.

**Construction Sector Digitalization and Productivity Challenge Program**:
The program (approximately $70M over seven years) will drive transformation to digitalized construction. The program will lower construction time and cost, while improving sector innovation potential, productivity and the pace at which low-carbon solutions can be deployed in new and retrofit construction projects.

The program will be specifically designed to harness and focus Canada’s research and innovation capacity in industry, academia and research-based OGDs to address fill key knowledge gaps (e.g. guidelines, standard methods of data exchange, mandates at jurisdictions, digital construction roadmap, integration methods between digital ecosystem and low carbon environmental impacts assessment tools, and standard data exchange formats, among others) to realise standardised seamless building/infrastructure data collection. It will also seek to exchange practices and reporting, implement processes to optimise the designs and compliance of buildings and infrastructure, leverage benefits of advanced manufacturing processes (including off-site panelized and modular construction), and advance development of low-carbon retrofit solutions that lever performance-based design.

Research will reverse-engineer the underlying performance standards from the existing prescriptive solutions in the National Model Codes and express these in terms of numerical quantities needed by designers and materials manufacturers when creating new low-carbon materials and systems and the buildings and houses that use them. Digitalization of the performance levels in building information management models will stimulate innovative building retrofit solutions and adoption of new low-carbon products.

Research and development motivated by this Program, in collaboration with an ecosystem of industry value chain participants, academia, and research-based OGDs, will provide the technical solutions needed for early adopters in the private sector to uniformly implement integrated digital construction practices throughout the asset lifecycle and across the sector.

Demonstration projects with early adopters will showcase the value of digitalized construction solutions, which will help increase sector productivity, reduce time and cost, when coupled with a shift from prescriptive to performance-based solutions.

This is a unique opportunity to play a leadership role in advancing transformational science, platform technologies, prototypes and products and their pilots, in the areas of low-carbon construction, and digitalized construction needed for the sector to achieve its 2050 greenhouse gas (GHG) carbon reduction targets.

**Screening Criteria**:
**Education**:
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