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.
I am Maryam Fazeli, a PhD student with joint supervision from Prof. Jason Evans, focusing on urban climatology and humanity-centered design. My educational background includes a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Shiraz University, with my Master’s thesis examining the evaluation of wall-modelled large eddy simulation in internal flows.
Research Assistants
Wei Li is a research student at Monash University. His current work involves developing neural network models to understand the physical laws governing urban geometry configurations and wind speed distribution.
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.
Lana Fraser is a third-year Bachelor of Science student majoring in Mathematical Modelling and Computer Science at ANU. In early 2024, she joined the Climate-Resilient Cities lab as a CLEX undergraduate scholar. Lana began a research project analyzing how varying wind directions affect wind speeds in idealized urban configurations. She uses data from a high-resolution computational fluid dynamics model to conduct her analysis and is currently continuing this work as a research assistant.
Elissa Curtain is a third-year Bachelor of Science student majoring in Climate and Weather at the University of Melbourne. Elissa joined the Climate-Resilient Cities lab as a CLEX undergraduate scholar in 2024. Her research assessed the urban representation in the models (GCMs) included in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). She analysed model performance to assess how they represented major cities as land grid points. Elissa is currently continuing this project as a research assistant with UNSW.
Visiting Scholars
Jonas Kittner is a PhD student at Ruhr University Bochum, specializing
in Urban Climate Informatics. His research focuses on the crowdsourcing
of smart-home weather data and the development of a global,
quality-controlled database of crowd-sourced weather station data. Jonas
investigates the challenges and potential applications of these
datasets, particularly in complex urban environments, to study phenomena
such as mesoscale urban effects, including urban heat advection.
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.