Greg Rulifson

Biography

Greg engineers at the confluence of education, international development, resilience, and community. He strives to connect motivated engineers and students with opportunities to work with communities to co-design more sustainable and joyful environments. Through the Humanitarian Engineering program at the Colorado School of Mines, he developed and taught courses such as Engineering for Sustainable Community Development, Projects for People, and Engineering for Social and Environmental Responsibility. He advised fourth-year engineering design teams that are working on real, impactful projects with partners around the world as well as the Mines chapter of Engineers Without Borders. At CU Boulder, Greg earned his PhD in Civil Engineering by conducting a longitudinal, intensive study of how students’ definitions of and relationship between social responsibility and engineering changed throughout college, and how prosocial career desires could even motivate students out of engineering majors. He also completed a certificate in Engineering for Developing Communities through course work and a practicum involving housing reconstruction in central Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia with Build Change. Greg has experience with projects in seven countries on five continents, where he has engineered structures through collaboration with community members to mitigate their risks due to earthquakes and tsunamis. He is a licensed Professional Civil Engineer in the State of California, earned an M.S. from Stanford University in Structural Engineering and Risk Analysis, and a B.S. from UC Berkeley in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice.