Kaiwen Chen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor from the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama since August 2021. She is the Director of the Building Informatics & Innovation (BII) Research Lab. Previous to join UA, Kaiwen was a post-doctoral scholar at High Performance Building Lab (HPBL) at Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Design and Planning from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, M.Sc. and B.S. in Construction Management from Southeast University. Dr. Chen has a keen research interest and academic record in the application of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) towards the automation in civil structure diagnostics and performance evaluation, especially with the usage of drone robotics including their sensor selection, flight design, data collection, and data post-processing. She has gained extensive experience and skills in data-intensive computing such as 2D image processing, 3D point cloud processing, infrared data analysis, building performance simulation, energy modeling, crowdsourcing data mining, high-performance computing, cloud computing, and data modeling. She is currently serving as a Co-PI for the US Department of Energy (DOE) research project on building envelope diagnostics and modeling through aerial intelligence. She is also a collaborator on the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) research project studying drone-assisted pavement inspection and maintenance. As an educator, Dr. Chen is dedicated to preparing students for their future industrial or academic careers with valuable knowledge, skills, and qualities. Her teaching goal is to improve students’ enthusiasms for learning knowledge in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operation (AECO) fields, as well as developing their capabilities to think independently and work collaboratively. She has been accumulating many teaching strategies through her instructional lecturing, many years of teaching assistant experience, as well as her training for the Future Professoriate Certificate. Additionally, she also pays close attention to outreach education by delivering public speech about technology frontiers in the AECO field, as well as joining or hosting interdisciplinary research symposium to communicate and collaborate.