May 20, 2026
Dr. Nancy Ma has received the prestigious IBPSA-USA 2026 Emerging Contributor Award, which recognizes an early-career individual who has demonstrated strong potential for significant contributions to the field of building simulation This recognition highlights Dr. Ma’s growing contributions to building performance simulation, human-centered building modeling, climate resilience, healthy buildings, and AI-enabled approaches for understanding how buildings affect people’s daily experiences,…
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May 22, 2024
Dr. Ma participated as a panelist in the “Debate: Artificial Intelligence in Building Simulation” session at SimBuild, organized by Dr. Tarek Rakha. The debate brought together leading voices in the building performance simulation community, including Dr. Michael Wetter, Dr. Wangda Zuo, and Dr. Alpha Yacob Arsano, to discuss the rapidly evolving role of artificial intelligence in building simulation. The session…
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May 9, 2024
HERB-Lab congratulates Vivienne Evans on her outstanding achievement in receiving the WPI Provost Award for her Major Qualifying Project, “What Makes a Home?” Vivienne was also selected as a finalist for the Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Department Advisory Board Award, reflecting the exceptional quality, creativity, and impact of her work. Vivienne’s MQP explored the meaning of home through the…
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Apr 28, 2024
PI Ma participated in the “Annex 95” planning workshop held in Boston, hosted at Northeastern University. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss the development of a proposed international research network on Human-Centric Buildings for a Changing Climate. The workshop focused on emerging research needs at the intersection of building performance, occupant behavior, climate resilience, indoor environmental quality,…
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Nov 20, 2023
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…
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Sep 14, 2023
HERB-Lab presented recent research on climate-resilient buildings and indoor air quality at two major international conferences: IBPSA Building Simulation 2023 in Shanghai, China, and CISBAT 2023 in Lausanne, Switzerland. At IBPSA Building Simulation 2023, PI Ma and PhD candidate Qi Zhang presented HERB-Lab’s research on resilient housing and climate change. The study examined how passive architectural infrastructure can help mitigate…
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Aug 29, 2023
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!
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Aug 7, 2023
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!
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Jun 20, 2023
HERB-Lab director, Nancy Ma, was invited to join the Technical Program Committee (TPC) for the 10th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2023).
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Dec 10, 2022
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.
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Oct 20, 2022
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.
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Dec 20, 2021
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.
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Oct 1, 2021
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/
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Apr 8, 2021
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,…
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Jan 30, 2019
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…
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Nov 19, 2018
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
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May 2, 2018
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…
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