People

Academic Staff

Dr Paola Boarin

Associate Professor
Co-founder and co-director

Research interests:

  • Sustainable design
  • Rating tools
  • Post-occupancy evaluation
  • Sustainable heritage conservation
  • Design technology

Dr Alessandro Premier

Senior Lecturer
Co-director

 Research interests:

  • Advanced façade design
  • Responsive architecture
  • Smart materials
  • Building retrofit
  • Sustainable design strategies and innovation
  • Colour and light in architecture

Dr Timothy Welch

Senior Lecturer
Co-director

Research interests:

  • Transportation service connectivity and equity
  • Methods to incorporate big data into transportation analysis
  • Infrastructure investments and housing values
  • Planning for non-motorized and emerging transport modes

Prof Errol Haarhoff

Emeritus Professor
Co-founder and inaugural co-director

Research interests:

  • Urban Design
  • Urban Settlement History
  • Urban Growth Management
  • Urban Intensification and housing
  • Modern Architecture History

Patricia Austin

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Planning and affordable housing
  • Sustainable housing, eco-districts and eco-towns
  • Planning for an ageing population
  • Planning for disabled access
  • Designing inclusive accessible built environments
  • Crime prevention, safer cities and communities
  • Planning and injury prevention
  • Strategies for more sustainable urban futures

Dr Elham Bahmanteymouri

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Urban Economics
  • Urban Growth Management and Housing Policies
  • Planning Theories and Political Economy of Space
  • Digital and Platforms Economy

Dr I-Ting Chuang

Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Informed Urban Design
  • Urban and Architecture Development
  • Spatial quality of public spaces
  • Design informatics in urban geography
  • Big data analytics in urban studies

Dr Michael Davis

Associate Professor

Research interests:

  • ‘Live’ projects: Implications for academy, profession and communities
  • Post-digital media practices: Critical making endeavors in architectural design
  • Fabrication technologies: Repurposing the commonplace to effect the novel
  • Indigenous New Zealand timbers: Extraction, use, reuse and tectonics
  • Design research into the future of the architectural discipline in island economies.

Dr Emilio Garcia

Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Resilience, inequality and affordability
  • Resilience of compact and disperse urban landscapes
  • Adaptive change, transformative change and collapse in cities
  • Panarchy, adaptive cycles, thresholds, and multiple stability states in built environments
  • Measurement of resilience and heterogeneity of urban landscapes
  • Resilience and Inheritance.

Dr Charmaine ‘Ilaiū Talei

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Built environments for Pacific peoples
  • Architectural practice-led research (or ‘action’ research)
  • Pacific community and stakeholder engagement
  • Values-led design processes
  • Applying Indigenous knowledges to solve modern architectural problems

Dr Iresh Jayawardena

Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Ecologically-based planning approaches
  • Water sensitive design
  • Sustainability and climate resilient cities
  • Socio-ecological systems, urban resilience and greenfield development
  • Integrated catchment management
  • Te Mana O te Wai, cultural ecosystem values and planning obligations

Dr Kai Gu

Associate Professor

Research interests:
  • Urban morphology and urban design
  • Methods of characterising and managing the urban landscape
  • Urban planning and design of Chinese cities

Dr Alys Longley

Associate Professor

Research interests:
  • Interdisciplinary practice
  • Performance writing
  • Choreographic research
  • Practice-led research
  • Inclusive arts pedagogy
  • Art and ecology
  • Collaboration across languages and borders

Dr Manfredo Manfredini

Associate Professor

Research interests:

  • Urban design history, theory and criticism
  • Architecture and spatial design history, theory and criticism
  • Affordable and social housing history, theory and practice
  • Modern European architecture history, theory and criticism
  • Sustainable development
  • Education in architecture

Dr Mohsen Mohammadzadeh

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:
  • Critical Urban Theory
  • Globalisation and Planning in the Emerging Global Cities
  • Planning and Urban Conflicts
  • Smart City, Cybernetic Technology and Ethics of Big Data
  • Transportation and Infrastructure Planning

Dr Sarosh Mulla

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Design research in architecture
  • Architects in the expanded field
  • Optical effects in architecture
  • Contemporary architectural practice

Dr Ferdinand Oswald

Senior Lecturer

Research interests:

  • Construction Detailing and Building Technologies
  • Facade Design Strategies
  • Optimizing Natural Ventilation
  • Low -Tech architecture
  • Reuse, recycling and separability of building components

Dr Barbara Ribeiro

Lecturer

Research interests:
  • Urbanism, public spaces
  • Sustainability Transitions theory, practice, and criticism
  • Design for Sustainability Transitions (DfST) in urbanism
  • Green infrastructure, urban resilience, and adaptation to climate change
  • Knowledge production and education through creative practice

Ms Julie Stout

Professional Teaching Fellow

Research interests:
  • Urban form and typologies
  • Public space
  • Cultural influence on urban space
  • Effect of sea-level rise on cities

Dr Emilson Silva

Professor

Research interests:

  • Energy Economics
  • Development Economics
  • Macroeconomics
  • International Economics

Dr Marek Tesar

Professor

Research interests:

  • Public space
  • Global childhood studies
  • The role of philosophy and post-theories in education and methodology
  • Particular interest in post-structural, post-qualitative, posthuman, new materialism, new empiricism thinking
  • International and comparative education

Affiliates

Dr Priscila Besen

Lecturer

Research interests:
  • Environmental design
  • Building energy retrofit

  • Passive House standard in temperate and warm climates
  • Post-occupancy evaluation
  • Sustainable neighbourhood design
  • Social and affordable housing

Sameh Shamout

Lecturer

Research interests:
  • Sustainable design
  • Green building technologies
  • Existing buildings retrofits
  • Passive design solutions
  • Urban Resilience
  • Recovery/rebuilt

PhD Students

Luis Medrano Gomez

PhD Candidate

Research interests:
  • Building retrofit
  • Post-occupancy evaluation
  • Energy codes and regulations
  • Energy performance gap
  • Human-building interaction
  • Rebound effect

Joemier Pontawe

PhD Candidate

Research interests:
  • Public transportation planning
  • Climate change mitigation in the transport sector
  • Active transportation and micromobility
  • Paratransit and other informal transport services
  • Local government / subnational level government planning and governance

Jane Waterhouse

PhD Candidate

Research interests:
  • Health and environmental design
  • Housing and aging in place
  • Therapeutic environments, Person – Environment theories
  • Environmental Psychology
  • Phenomenology and embodiment
  • Place and social construction of space