Jairo Uribe Escamilla

Jaime Santamaría Serrano is a Colombian civil engineer, with degrees from the universities of Los Andes, Bogotá and Plttsburg; he received a master's degree from the University of Illinois in structures and soils and has diplomas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States, in transportation systems, and from the International Cooperation Agency, of Japan, in underground engineering.

A large part of his professional consulting practice has been with the Colombian firm Ingetec S.A., in Bogotá, where he has directed studies, projects and designs for hydroelectric plants, roads, urban roads, bridges and mass transport. Several of these projects have been in consortium with international firms, mainly from North America, Spain, France and Belgium. He has also been director of civil works auditing in Colombia and Panama. For a few years he also directed construction works for buildings and bridges.

He has participated in the conciliation and arbitration processes of the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce as a technical expert. He has been vice-president of the Colombian Society of Engineers (SCI), a founding member of the Structural Engineering Institute and the Transportation and Development Institute, in the United States, and, in general, director of numerous professional organizations.

He was also vice-president of Region IV of the Pan-American Union of Engineering Associations (UPADI), whose headquarters are in Costa Rica, which includes the 27 countries of America and the Caribbean; he was a member of the board of directors of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), of which he was its International Director for three years. He is currently a member of the Anti-Corruption Committee of the ASCE; he is chancellor for life of the Association of Graduates of the University of the Andes (Unlandinos) and since last November, for the next four years, he has been the treasurer of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (FMOI/WFEO), whose headquarters are in Paris.