Dr. Burcu Akinci is the Paul Christiano University Professor and department head of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a member of the National Academies of Construction, ASCE Fellow and AAAS Fellow. She earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), MBA from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), and master’s and PhD degrees in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Akinci’s research interests includes modeling and reasoning about digital twins of buildings and infrastructure systems to streamline construction and infrastructure operations. She and her team specifically focus on investigating utilization and integration of building information models with data capture technologies, such as 3D imaging and other sensors, and develop approaches to support proactive and predictive operations and management and to enable autonomy in the built environment.

Dr. Akinci is the recipient of the ASCE Peurifoy Award in 2023, the IAARC Tucker-Hasegawa Award in 2021, the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering award in 2020, Professor of the year award in 2011 from the ASCE Pittsburgh section, the CETI Outstanding Early Career Researcher award from the FIATECH in 2008 and the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2007. She has best paper awards from the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering in 2002, and from the Construction Research Congress, ISARC and ICCCBE in 2009, 2011 and 2014, respectively.