Dr. Burcu Akinci is the Paul Christiano Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Associate Dean for Research at the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  She was co-director of Smart Infrastructure Institute which conducts research on data-driven awareness about infrastructure systems, advanced information models and visualization approaches, and proactive decision support.  

Dr. Akinci’s research interests modeling and reasoning about information-rich histories of buildings and infrastructure systems, to streamline construction and infrastructure operations and management.  She specifically focuses on investigating utilization and integration of building information models with data capture technologies, such as 3D imaging and embedded sensors, to capture semantically-rich as-built histories of construction projects and infrastructure operations and to support proactive and predictive operations and management.

Dr. Akinci is the recipient of 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 FIATECH in 2008, and ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2007. She has best paper awards from Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering in 2002, and from Construction Research Congress, ISARC and ICCCBE in 2009, 2011, and 2014 respectively.  

Dr. Akinci has one patent, two provisional patents and over 70 referred journal publications and 100 conference publications.  She was the PI of more than $6M grants and co-PI of more than $10M grants, supported by federal and state agencies and industry.  She has given over 100 invited presentations and co-edited books on CAD/GIS Integration and on Embedded Commissioning.  She co-founded and is the Chief Innovation Officer at LeanFM Technologies, which won 2017 Pittsburgh Business Times Innovation Award.