Kay Smarsly is a Professor and Director of the Institute of Digital and Autonomous Construction at Hamburg University of Technology, Germany, and has authored/co-authored more than 200 papers in international journals, books, and conference proceedings. He is a reviewer of numerous international scholarly journals, conferences, and funding institutions and is teaching in undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and advanced training programs. From 1996 to 2002, he studied Civil Engineering with a specialization in Structural Engineering at Ruhr University Bochum. After research stays at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, he received his doctorate in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Ruhr University Bochum in 2008, where he was actively involved in research and teaching until 2010. Professor Smarsly was as a DFG Research Fellow at Stanford University from 2010 to 2013 and at Berlin University of Technology in 2013. In the same year, he was appointed Full Professor of Computing in Civil Engineering at Bauhaus University Weimar. In Weimar, he also held a lectureship within the Bauhaus Academy since 2013, and he was a founding member of the Institute of Computing in Civil Engineering, Mathematics and Building Physics at Bauhaus University Weimar in 2019 and the Institute Director from 2020. In 2021, Professor Smarsly accepted the appointment as Professor and Director at Hamburg University of Technology to set up the newly founded Institute of Digital and Autonomous Construction, located in the Hamburg Innovation Port. Professor Smarsly is a member of several advisory boards of international journals. He is the Chairman of the German Association of Computing in Civil Engineering (GACCE) and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (ISCCBE). Since 2024, Professor Smarsly is a member of the North Rhine-Westphalia Academy of Sciences and Arts.