Team
Our research team constitutes a wide range of expertise across disciplines of urban climatology, engineering, data mining, and architecture, which are critical for successfully implementing our multi-disciplinary projects.
Lead – Dr Negin Nazarian
Dr. Negin Nazarian is the leader of the Climate-Resilient Cities lab and a Scientia Lecturer in the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales (UNSW, Sydney).
As an urban climatologist, Negin is interested in the ways the built environment interacts with the climate, and in return, how urban dwellers are affected by this interaction. Her research projects mainly focus on urban (over)heating and ventilation, and follow two main tracks: First, enabling ‘climate-conscious’ or ‘climate-smart’ cities – How can we have a human-centric urban design that is in harmony with the local climate?
The second research focus is on multiscale urban climate modeling. Her overall research goal is to develop modeling techniques that impact not only the climate analyses in the scientific community but also enable architects, planners, and policymakers to incorporate comprehensive, accurate, yet efficient assessments of urban design.
Postdoctoral Research Fellows
PhD Students

Mahya Parchami is a Ph.D. student interested in thermal comfort and personal heat exposure in outdoor settings. She’s devoted to understanding how environmental conditions impact individuals. With a focus on human-scale effects, Mahya carefully observes environmental factors. She explores links between microclimate elements and our body’s reactions. Her dedication aims to provide insights connecting our surroundings to our well-being.

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Marzie Naserikia is a Ph.D. student (joint with Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW) interested in the way cities develop and adapt to climate change impacts. Within the area of sustainable cities, her research focuses on urban heat island adaptation and mitigation, land use planning, and investigation of green infrastructures to improve citizen’s thermal comfort. She is also interested in smart city initiatives and first joined the Climate-Resilient Cities Lab as a research assistant on the project “Design Next Smart Campus at UNSW”.

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Research Assistants

Crystal Chan is a research assistant responsible for supporting research activities in the CRC Lab. She did her BSc in Earth System Science at CUHK, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in City Planning at UNSW. Her field of interest lies in urban spatial analytics, smart city initiatives, digital governance, sustainable urban form, and liveability. Her role as an RA involves various tasks such as collecting and analyzing data for an urban heat project and conducting a literature review on CO2-based airborne transmission risk in buildings.

I am Shakir Ayman Azad, a third-year Bachelor of Data Science and Decisions student majoring in computational data science at UNSW, Sydney. I started my journey with CCRC in November 2022 as a CLEX undergrad scholar and later in August 2023, I commenced my position as a Research Assistant under Dr. Negin Nazarian. During this time, I’ve focused on annual thermal comfort analyses in Australian cities using clustered weather types where the clustering helps streamline the computation of thermal comfort predictions for efficient urban planning. Currently I am working on extending this framework to develop practical use cases.
Alumni


Nizar Hoblos was a research assistant in the Climate-Resilient Cities Lab on the project “Design Next Smart Campus at UNSW”. He is a PhD Student at the UNSW Business School, School of Information Systems and Technology Management.



Fuyu (Nick) Zhang dedicates to provide technical support and data analysis for the MyAir Project as a sub-division of the Smart Campus UNSW, under supervision of Dr Negin Nazarian. His research area is mainly focused on microclimate data analysis and assessment for internal air temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2) and volatile organic compound (VOCs), as well as the correlation with occupiers’ activity, working performance and health symptoms.