The Center for Offsite Construction is entering the 2026–27 academic year with its largest Senior Research Fellow cohort yet.

Following the largest number of applications in the program’s short history, 21 professionals have accepted appointments as CfOC Senior Research Fellows (more than doubling the size of last year’s cohort).

That growth reflects a momentum that exceeds our wildest expectations. The Senior Research Fellow Program was designed around a simple premise: the transition to industrialized construction is too broad to be solved by a single discipline. 

• Standards developers can define interfaces, but those interfaces eventually encounter contracts. 
• Contracts encounter financing and insurance. 
• Products encounter software. 
• Software encounters data standards. 

… And all of that eventually encounters the people who must explain, teach, test, adopt, and improve the system.

Accordingly, this year’s Fellows come from a deliberately wider range of backgrounds. Alongside architects, contractors, manufacturers, developers, educators, and researchers, the Center recruited attorneys, storytellers, software builders, automation specialists, and practitioners working directly on configurable building products.

They are joining at an unusually consequential moment. The CfOC’s Research Roadmap now includes two active physical-interface standards, work on a shared CTO File Type, legal research into the transition from service-based construction contracts toward transactions involving goods, the launch of a national accreditation body for offsite-construction education, and a growing collection of public essays explaining the intellectual framework connecting those efforts.

Each SRF will select projects where their expertise can move an existing piece of work forward: reading critically, drafting, building software, testing assumptions, connecting practitioners, developing curriculum, telling the story, or helping turn a research proposition into usable infrastructure.

This process is important to how the CfOC thinks about research. We are less interested in assembling an honorary network than in assembling a working one.

The first major experiment with this larger cohort comes on August 26, when the Fellows will gather for the first 2026–27 Senior Research Fellow Retreat. Rather than begin with presentations about what the Center already believes, the retreat will begin by asking the new Fellows to challenge it.

Twenty-one new friends… we'll need to buy a bigger table.