Research Associate in Building Stock Modelling
Academic Division: Mechanics, Materials and Design
Research group: Sustainable Development
Email: ly387@cam.ac.uk
Research interests
I am currently a Research Associate at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge.
I come from Zhenyuan, a historic town in China known for its rich architectural heritage. Growing up in such an environment inspired my long-standing interest in sustainable and livable built environments, as well as the renewal of existing urban fabric.
My research focuses on data-efficient modelling of existing building stocks for multiscale sustainable urban renewal, particularly in data-scarce contexts. I aim to develop approaches that enable multiscale sustainability analytics by integrating data science, machine learning, and domain knowledge from the sustainable built environment.
The building sector plays a critical role in global sustainability transitions. As most buildings that will exist in 2050 have already been built, reducing environmental impacts depends largely on how effectively existing building stocks are understood, modelled, and managed. This motivates my central research question: How can we model and leverage existing urban building stocks to support data-driven multiscale sustainability decisions, particularly under conditions of data scarcity?
To address this, my research seeks to move the field in three directions:
- from data-intensive to data-efficient building stock modelling (a.k.a. city information modelling),
- from building-level analysis to system-level sustainability, and
- from single-dimension metrics to coupled assessment of energy, material, carbon, and health performance.
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cbmfFzsAAAAJ&hl=en
Department role and responsibilities