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.
As we continue to build more efficient buildings, one challenge still remains: occupant behavior. How can we ensure that people living in efficient buildings respond appropriately? Educate them. https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/news-insights/high-performance-people-in-high-performance-buildings/
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
The adverse effects of climate change are becoming more evident and global warming is now undeniable. The efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change have been progressing slowly and adaptation is now one of the major strategies which has been considered by both developed and developing countries. The challenging and ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement in December 2015…