Burçin Becerik-Gerber, DDes., NAC, F.ASCE, a professor and chair in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and founder and director of the USC Center for Intelligent Environments, has been named a fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
During the last 15 years, Becerik-Gerber’s research has focused on advanced data acquisition, modeling, visualization for design, construction, and control of user-centered responsive and adaptive built environments. She pioneered a new field: Human-Building Interaction (HBI), which converges to represent the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. Her work is published in more than 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. It has received the support of over $14 million from a variety of sources, including the NSF, DoE, DHS, and DoT and corporate sponsors.
In 2012, she was named by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 technology innovators under the age of 35 (first civil engineering faculty to receive this recognition). She received the FIATECH Celebration of Engineering and Technology Innovation Award in 2018. The same year, she was awarded the Rutherford Visiting Fellowship by the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national data science and AI institute. Between 2012 and 2019, she held the inaugural Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair. In 2020, she was appointed as a USC Viterbi Dean's Professor.
In 2021, she was elected to the National Academy of Construction. Since 2021, she has served on the board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She received mentoring and leadership recognitions such as the Mellon Mentoring Award (2017) and an Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES) Fellowship (2021), which speak to her commitment to education and leadership in academia. In 2022, she received an Emmy Award as a co-producer of the documentary Lives, Not Grades, which tells the story of a novel course she co-designed and co-taught that focuses on engineering innovation for global challenges.
In 2023, Becerik-Gerber received ASCE’s Computing in Civil Engineering Award followed in 2024 by the Society’s Peurifoy Construction Research Award. She serves as an associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (since 2011) and for ASCE’s OPEN: Multidisciplinary Journal of Civil Engineering since 2023.
