Department of Engineering / Profiles / Dr Liang Yuan

Department of Engineering

Dr Liang Yuan

ly387

Liang Yuan

Research Associate in Building Stock Modelling

Academic Division: Mechanics, Materials and Design

Research group: Sustainable Development

Email: ly387@cam.ac.uk

Personal website

Research interests

I joined the BuildZero project team led by Jonathan Cullen and André Cabrera Serrenho at University of Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Researcher, after obtaining my doctoral degree from University of Hong Kong (HKU). BuildZero, which received a grant of £6 million from UKRI, has an ambitious vision of transforming the UK's buildings for net-zero material extraction, net-zero carbon, and net-zero waste. 

I come from Zhenyuan, an ancient and livable town in China with many architectural heritages. Such a place inspired my keen interest in sustainable, livable, and smart building construction and urban renewal. By integrating my disciplinary knowledge of Materials Science and Engineering, Architectural Engineering, and Data Science, I started my academic research journey in an interdisciplinary field, i.e., Digital Sustainable Construction.

While the building and construction sector plays a vital role in socioeconomic development, it also poses significant environmental challenges. Globally, it consumes around half of all extracted materials and a quarter of final energy, while generating construction waste that constitutes approximately one-third of total municipal solid waste. Given that the majority of buildings that will be in use in 2050 have already been constructed today, the key to addressing these challenges lies in the effective management of the existing building stock. This raises a scientific question: What measures can effectively mitigate the environmental burden of buildings to advance a sustainable building and construction sector?

Circular Economy (CE) holds great promise for this problem. By integrating emerging digital technologies (e.g., big data, machine learning, computer vision, and remote sensing) to model and simulate the environmental-economic-social effects when implementing various CE measures in building construction, renovation, and demolition at different spatio-temporal scales, efficient pathways for improving the building stock sustainability can be revealed. 

Focusing on this direction, my research interests involve:

  • Building Renovation and Urban Renewal;
  • Digital Construction; and
  • Circular Economy in Construction, a.k.a., Circular Construction.

Profiles:

  1. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cbmfFzsAAAAJ&hl=en
  2. ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Liang-Yuan-26
  3. LinkedIn: https://hk.linkedin.com/in/liang-yuan-a307a1302/en
  4. Resource Efficiency Collective: https://www.refficiency.org/

Department role and responsibilities