News

I am excited to share that Dr. Yalin Lu, a Postdoc Fellow at the HERB-Lab, has been awarded “EXCELLENT VIDEO” (second prize) in the 2023 Postdoc Video Challenge, “Addressing Grand Challenges,” hosted by the journal Buildings & Cities. Yalin’s video entry, titled “Designing a Healthcare Built Environment That Cares for All Children,” effectively conveys the message that we need to…

HERB-Lab director, Nancy Ma, was invited to join the IBPSA BS2023 Poster Award Committee. Look forward to listening to various poster presentations on building performance simulation!

I am excited to welcome YALIN LU as a postdoc fellow to our HERB-Lab. We will continue to advance our mission of creating healthier and more sustainable environments for all. Welcome to the team and already looking forward to your contributions to this important field!

HERB-Lab director, Nancy Ma, presented her research work to one of the most famous indoor environment labs at the Center for the Built Environment, UC Berkeley WeLL Seminar. It was so much fun sharing the topic of human dimensions of building performance that she is most passionate about with the CBE students and researchers.

The Laboratory for Healthy, Environmental, and Resilient Buildings (HERB-Lab) at the Department of Civil, Environmental, & Architectural Engineering at WPI (PI: Nancy Ma, PhD) invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow position in support of research in Architectural Engineering and specifically in the areas of human factors related to building technologies and indoor environmental quality.

Nancy Ma, director of the HERB-Lab, has won the Building and Environment 2021 Best Paper Award. One of three papers awarded among 4,500 submissions, “Adaptive behavior and different thermal experiences of real people: A Bayesian neural network approach to thermal preference prediction and classification” was co-authored by Liang Chen, Jian Hu, and Professors Paris Perdikaris, and William W. Braham.

Nancy Ma, director of the HERB-Lab, was awarded a highly competitive GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation to support a project she is developing in conjunction with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Sleep Lab. Ma’s project is titled, “Indoor Environment and Sleep Health: In-Lab and In-Field Analysis of Environmental Factors on Sleep Quality and Quantity.”  In her abstract, she writes,…

The Special Issue on “Human Factors in Green Building” addresses the design of indoor environment quality for users’ needs. The collected papers cover various building types and the research highlights the different needs of users. In working environments, employees’ stress is the main concern in the workplace design, especially for open plan offices where lack of privacy and over exposure…

Nancy Ma reflects on her time studying at the Melbourne School of Design, and what inspired her to pursue an international career in research which has led her to undertake her PhD at theUniversity of Pennsylvania in the United States of America. https://msd.unimelb.edu.au/study/discover/nan-mas-passion-for-research-takes-her-to-the-unites-states