Charles M. (Chuck) Eastman
Professor, College of Design and the College of Computing (joint appointment)
Founder, Digital Building Lab

Chuck Eastman was an early pioneer of AEC CAD, developing research 3D and early solid and parametric modeling systems, at first general for all designed products, later focusing on the building industry starting in the middle 1970s . He was a faculty member in Architecture and Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University and UCLA before his current position at GA Tech. At Carnegie-Mellon, he developed the first working prototype in the US of what is now called a solid modeler and later a parametric modeler. In the 1980s his group implemented an early modeler for BIM (Building Information Modeling) and published in the early 1970s. He made contributions to the foundations of solid modeling, parametric modeling, and engineering databases. Earlier, he developed early solid modeling systems, early parametric modelers, interactive digital workbenches residing within a database. This evolved into BDS (Building Description System and GLIDE (Graphical Language for Interactive Design). During the time of development of CAD and parametric modelers, Chuck consulted for Boeing, General Motors, SDRC and other major industry firms. He also formed the Architecture PhD. Program at Carnegie-Mellon. He founded and was first President of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in  Architecture). At GA Tech he founded and directed for six years  the Digital Building Laboratory, that is sponsored by fourteen AEC companies and facilitates collaborative research with them and GA Tech faculty and PhD. students in Architecture, Building Construction, Civil and Mechanical Engineering. More recently, through the DBL, he has focused on the interoperability among suites of connected applications to support advanced workflows.

In addition, he currently has projects with the Precast Concrete Institute and the Charles Pankow Foundation, with the America Institute of Steel Construction and the American Concrete Institute, defining BIM exchange standards for these industry areas. He recently completed work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology on improving IFC semantic foundations and has other projects in advanced BIM. For five years, he also received funding from GSA to provide automated design reviews for US Courthouses.

In November 2006, Chuck was awarded the BIM 2006 BuildingSMART Open Data Award by the International Alliance for Interoperability. He is co-author with Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sacks and Kathleen Liston, of the Building Information Modeling Handbook, that came out in a second edition in March of 2011 from John Wiley and Sons. The third edition is being drafted. Earlier, we wrote Building Product Models for CRC Press. He is author of over 100 papers on BIM, parametric modeling and on databases and product models.