PhD Opportunity in AI, Robotics, and Digital Twins for Civil Infrastructure at The University of Alabama The University of Alabama in United States

PhD opportunity at The University of Alabama in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering.

The group, led by Kaiwen Chen (Assistant Professor), is recruiting a highly motivated PhD student to start in Fall 2026 or Spring 2027. The research area sits at the intersection of AI, robotics, digital twins, and sustainable civil infrastructure.

Research topics include real-to-sim-to-real digital twins for multimodal data fusion and simulation analytics, AI-enabled robotics, human-AI-robot teaming, and community-driven research and technology transfer pathways. The work is aimed at infrastructure diagnostics, performance simulation, and retrofitting for civil infrastructure and construction applications.

Ideal applicants should have interests or experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning, computer vision, multimodal sensing, robotics and autonomous systems, and digital twins for civil infrastructure or related engineering domains.

To apply, email [email protected] with a CV, transcript, and a one-page statement of research interests by 2026-06-01.