"Since I am a composites professional, I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on exchanging the wooden strips for foam strips?"

Yes, don't. Fiberglas foam composite one-off boat building requires even more tooling than glas-woodstrip building. Generally speaking you almost have to build a boat before you can build your boat. The hours required for finishing are much greater and the materials are more expensive. In the end you'll end up with a very expensive (money and time) or heavy boat. Rushton produced very light and realatively durable craft without glas or even decent adhesives. These boats took great skill to build well, but relied almost exclusively on the characteristics of mechanically fastened wood for their strength. You have to remember that trees, actually flowers on steriods, have had about 300 million years of field testing to improve upon their stems. The characteristics that are needed to compete with each other for sun light while resisting the forces of gravity and the weather are the ones that make pieces of those stems work so well in small craft. When combined with the characteristics of thermosetting resins and man-made reinforcing fabrics you have an almost fool proof method of boat building.

If you really want to experiment, build a stripper first. Then pull a plug from it and build a glas-foam boat from the plug. Do some testing and let us know the results as to weigth vs. strength, cost and hours spent.