Yelda Turkan

Dr. Yelda Turkan is a professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University. Her research advances the use of artificial intelligence, computer vision, digital twins, and reality capture technologies to improve the planning, delivery, inspection, and management of the built environment. Her work spans construction automation, infrastructure inspection, lidar-based sensing, building information modeling (BIM), and emerging applications of multimodal AI and robotics, with an emphasis on improving safety, sustainability, resilience, and decision making across the lifecycle of buildings and infrastructure.

Dr. Turkan’s research has been supported by major federal and industry organizations, including the National Science Foundation, Federal Highway Administration, and National Cooperative Highway Research Program. She is also a Hans Fischer Fellow at the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study, where her work focuses on multimodal approaches for digital twinning of the built environment.

Dr. Turkan serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence for a Sustainable Built Environment (AISBE) and as an Associate Editor of ASCE OPEN. She is also a member of the editorial board of Advanced Engineering Informatics. Her professional leadership includes service on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC), the Executive Committee of the ASCE Center for Technical Advancement, and the ISPRS Inter-Commission Working Group on Digital Construction: Reality Capture, Automated Inspection, and Integration to BIM.

She holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo and degrees in Civil Engineering, Geomatics Engineering, and Remote Sensing from Istanbul Technical University.