Burcu H. Akinci, Ph.D., NAC, F.AAAS, Dist.M.ASCE, department head of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and a Hamerschlag University professor, has been honored with election by ASCE for its class of 2025 distinguished members for pioneering advancements and groundbreaking research to advance and shape facility and construction information systems through transformative developments in building information data management.
Akinci, a CMU faculty member since 2000, is an internationally recognized educator and researcher in building and construction information systems and computing in civil engineering domains. She is also a very highly regarded advisor for a large group of research graduate students. Her research contributions include modeling and reasoning about information-rich histories of buildings and infrastructure systems to streamline construction and infrastructure/facility operations.
She has integrated building information models with data capture technologies, such as 3D imaging and embedded sensors, to create digital twins of constructions projects and infrastructure operations and has developed approaches to support proactive and predictive operations and management.
Akinci’s research has not only served as foundational for many other academic research efforts, but also as the basis for an AI startup she launched a few years ago to enhance building energy efficiency that has been deployed in dozens of hospitals and other buildings.
Her vision is innovating new approaches for situational awareness and assessment via information-rich as-built models, by using new tools for data acquisition and creating novel representations for project history, and has proved extremely successful and inspirational for an entire generation of researchers worldwide. These problems required her strong construction management background for defining the problem and her outstanding computer science expertise to originally combine different information systems, computing languages, and advanced modeling tools.
Akinci, not content to simply develop new theories and prepare a workforce that is changing the way industry operates, has directly impacted industry by leading her new company, LeanFM, which is built on patented cloud-based AI software that improves maintenance operations by finding root causes and insights related to HVAC faults. She has published over 195 peer-reviewed papers, co-edited two books, and has two patents and one provisional patent.
She has participated in two National Academies studies: Predicting Outcomes of Investments in Maintenance and Repair of Federal Facilities and the Review of Effectiveness and Efficiency of Defense Environmental Cleanup Activities of the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Akinci received ASCE’s 2023 Puerifoy Award and the IAARC Tucker-Hasegawa Award in 2021, among others. She has founded a task force, now a committee, on Creating/Fostering Inclusive Academic Communities supported by the ASCE Construction Research Council and the Computing Division Executive Committee.
