Dr. Becerik-Gerber is a Professor and Director of Graduate Programs at the Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of University of Southern California. She is the founding director of the Innovation in Integrated Informatics LAB and the Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS). Her research falls at the intersection of built environment, machine intelligence and systems thinking. Specifically, her work focuses on the acquisition, modeling, and analysis of the data needed for user-centered built environments, and the development of novel frameworks and visualization techniques to improve built-environment efficiency, while increasing user satisfaction. Dr. Becerik-Gerber graduated from Istanbul Technical University with a Bachelor of Architecture (1999) and an M.S. in Architecture (2001). She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she received an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (2002). She earned her Doctor of Design (2006) degree from Harvard University in the field of Project Management and Information Systems. After graduating from Harvard University, she worked as a consultant and taught in the area of information automation and management for three years. To date, she has published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers and her work has received support worth more than $8 million from a variety of sources. In 2012, Burcin has been appointed as the inaugural holder of the Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She is the recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Recognition (2012), NSF CAREER Award (2014), Viterbi Junior Research Award (2016), Mellon Mentoring Award (2017), Celebration of Engineering & Technology Innovation Award (CETI) in the Outstanding Early Career Researcher category from FIATECH (2018) and the Rutherford Visiting Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute (2018). She serves as an Associate Editor for ASCE’s Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering since 2011.
User-Centered Built Environments
Human-built environment interactions; Occupancy and behavior driven control of building systems; Modeling user preferences; Energy-aware and comfort-driven smart built environments; User-centered design and operation of built environments; People-centered AI for built environments
Responsive and Adaptive Built Environments
Cognitive built environments; Adjustable/progressive autonomy; Intelligent automation of building systems; Human-built environment collaboration & communication; Disaster-prepared built environments; Robot-worker collaboration
Situational Awareness for Built Environments
Data-driven engineering; User-centered sensing and learning; Indoor location sensing; Integrated building/infrastructure reality capture systems; Modeling occupancy and associated energy loads; Online learning for predicting human & building behavior
Building/Infrastructure Information Modeling & Visualization
Digital twins of buildings and cities; Geometric and semantic built environment information visualization; Building information modeling/visualization; Immersive and interactive environments; Cross-disciplinary, collaborative, geographically distributed engineering.
