Liang Yuan | Department of Engineering
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 Prof. Jonathan Cullen and Dr. André Cabrera Serrenho at the University of Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Before joining Cambridge, I completed my PhD at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong (HKU). 

I come from Zhenyuan, a historic and picturesque town in China known for its rich architectural heritage. Growing up in such a place sparked my passion for sustainable, livable, and intelligent buildings, as well as thoughtful urban renewal. With academic training spanning Materials Science and Engineering, Architectural Engineering, and Data Science, I embarked on an interdisciplinary research path in AI-aided Sustainable Construction.

The building sector is essential to societal development, yet it also poses pressing environmental challenges. Worldwide, the sector consumes nearly half of all extracted materials and one-quarter of final energy, and generates about one-third of municipal solid waste. Because most buildings that will stand in 2050 already exist today, reducing the sector’s environmental footprint depends largely on how effectively we manage the existing building stock. This raises a central research question: How can we utilize and adapt existing buildings to meet future social and economic needs, while at the same time minimizing resource use and environmental impact?​

Circular Economy (CE) offers powerful solutions. By integrating advanced technologies, such as big data analytics, machine learning, and remote sensing, we can model and simulate the environmental, economic, and social outcomes of circular strategies across building lifecycles and spatial scales. This data-driven approach can help identify effective pathways to a more sustainable, resource-efficient built environment.

Focusing on this direction, my research interests involve:

  • High-resolution building stock modelling (a.k.a., city information modelling);
  • Environmental-economic benchmarking of circular construction strategies; and
  • AI-aided construction & demolition waste management

Profiles:

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

Department role and responsibilities