Find a supervisor
Successful candidates to a PhD will be allocated a primary supervisor and a secondary supervisor to guide and support your research. Our overall aim is to provide careful, sympathetic and expert supervision from active researchers.
Supervisors and research topics
| Supervisor | Research interests |
|---|---|
| Dr Emma Cheatle | Critical/creative, poetic/politic spatial theory, autotheory and ficto-critical writing; Feminist and de-colonial theory; Urban common land; Histories and theories of domesticity, and of health and maternity architecture; Modernist art and architecture; Interdisciplinary topics between architecture and literature. |
| Dr Isaiah Durosaiye | Architectural gerontology; ageing in the built environment; age-friendly environments; age-friendly workplace; ageing, housing and livelihood; health and wellbeing of older people; population ageing and demographic trends; urbanisation in global south contexts; sustainable design of the built environment; post-occupancy evaluation. |
| Dr Yasmina El Chami | Architectural and urban history; colonial/imperial architecture and urbanism; missionary/religious imperialism; postcolonial studies; material and environmental histories of architecture; post-conflict urbanism and reconstruction; United States/French/British imperialism; Middle East / Eastern Mediterranean / Global South. |
| Professor Steve Fotios | Lighting and research methodology. I am interested in all aspects of lighting: currently our major focus is lighting for pedestrians and cyclists. Within this we explore research methods for visual psychophysics to ensure that our findings are robust. |
| Professor Karim Hadjri | Ageing-in-place; Inclusive/age-friendly/accessible design; Design for health and wellbeing; Design of dementia-friendly environments; Design of enabling environments (housing and care settings). |
| Dr Liam Healy |
My practice-research interests focus around situated speculative and critical design, participation, co-design, prototyping, DIY design, care, the Anthropocene, design's intersection with actor-network theory (ANT), science and technology studies (STS), and speculative thought. I am also interested in (and convinced by the value of) designing and researching through making and practice — to think through materials and their processes by experimenting, modelling and prototyping, as well as utilising photo and video methods. |
| Dr Luis Hernan |
Domesticity, intersection of technology and home; Creative Practice, PhD by Design; Feminist Theory and New Materialism; De-colonial Theory, Imperialism and Othering; Latin America; Auto-theory, Auto-ethnography, Auto-fiction, Creative Writing, Poetry and Ficto-critical approaches; Critical approaches to digital technologies; Science Fiction and Architecture, Speculative Fiction, Decolonial Imaginaries and thinking futures otherwise; Film-making and Photography as methods. |
| Dr Tim Ireland | Computational/generative design methods, Morphology/form finding and spatial configuration, Semiotics and meaning-making in architectural design and perception of built environment, The concept of space/spatial perception, Experimental architecture. |
| Dr Adriana Laura Massidda |
I am currently working in two main research areas. First, for twelve years I have been studying and reconstructing the history of Buenos Aires shantytowns. Second, in my most recent research I have started to interrogate the intersection between ecological vulnerability and urban poverty. I explored this through the environmental history of waste in two social housing sites in London and Leicester. My forthcoming research project will look at floods and water displacement in low-income South West Buenos Aires. I welcome PhD inquiries focused on these or related topics, on any geographical area of the candidate’s expertise. Keywords: |
| Dr Krzysztof Nawratek | I'm passionate about examining the intersection of spatialised post-secular thought and the interplay between ideologies or worldviews and spatial practices. In my research, I prioritise non-dialectic modes of thinking. My studies have two interwoven components. The first element is theoretical, rooted in the tradition of hermeneutic inquiry. This involves an exploration of radical contextualisation and inclusivity, as well as how influences from The Absolute Other (also known as 'das ganz Andere', a term coined by Rudolf Otto) manifest in spatial arrangements. The second component of my research takes a more empirical approach. It delves into the political and religious imaginations and the behaviours related to religion and politics within spatial contexts. |
| Dr Chengzhi Peng |
Explainable metamodels for evaluating indoor air quality of institutional building stocks; Impact of urban form on air quality and community solar micro-grid potential; Built characteristics and building operations prone to substandard indoor air quality and thermal comfort in residential homes under present and future climate. |
| Professor Doina Petrescu | Feminist theory and practice, participation in architecture, contemporary theory, politics and poetics of space, activist praxis and education, culture and resilience. |
| Dr Anthony Powis | I am interested in the interrelation of spatial production, knowledge production, and climate production, including: boundaries of architectural knowledges; futures of architecture, urban design and creative practice; and responses to the climate crisis. Intra-actions of climate and urbanisation (especially in relation to the South-Asian monsoon); architecture and (hydro-)geology; more-than-human research methodologies; participatory design and research; the production of space of urban protests; drawing as a research method. |
| Dr Xiang Ren | Architectural history and theory of 20th century, Modernism and after; Social and cultural anthropological studies of building and settlement; Vernacular, participative and socially-engaged architecture; Rapid urbanism and traditional villages; Architectural disciplinarily viable knowledge production and dissemination; Architectural research practice and design research. |
| Dr Youcao Ren |
My research revolves around sustainable urban transformation in the global South and East in response to UN Sustainable Development Goals. My recent ethnographic work explores everyday access to sanitation and water through an intersectionality lens, with a particular focus to inquiry and (re)interpret informality. Through this, I investigate alternative, situated scenarios of sustainable infrastructure transformation. My case studies primarily focus on the urban China but extend to cities in India and Brazil too. I'm part of the Susinfra network, which is the umbrella for a portfolio of research on urban infrastructural transformations in the global south. The second strand of my research looks into the changing conceptualisation of urban home in the transforming China, with a particular focus on the entangled human-land-infrastructure relationship. I interpret and represent 'home', increasing situated in the wider urban context rather than defined only by enclosed walls, using a combined ethnographic and visual approach. |
| Professor Darren Robinson | Statistical modelling of peoples’ presence, activities, comfort and behaviours; Multi-agent stochastic simulation, integrating the statistical models with complementary representations of agents’ decisions; Solar radiation and daylight modelling in the urban context; Urban energy simulation; Integrated modelling of the spatial structures and functioning of urban systems. |
| Dr Tanzil Shafique | Global South / Southern urbanism, climate adaptation and citizen-led/locally led adaptation in architecture and urban design, decolonial activism, social and spatial justice in the built environment, working with marginalised communities. |
| Dr Sally Shahzad | Thermal comfort: I am passionate about all aspects of thermal comfort related to the actual buildings. Some examples include: adaptive thermal comfort; environmental control; user behaviour regarding the thermal environment; Personal Comfort Systems (PCS); energy efficiency; older people; and children. |
| Dr Iulia Statica |
(Post)socialist architecture and urbanism; global urbanism and postcolonialism; gender and architecture; documentary and ethnographic film; domesticity/housing infrastructures/care/migration; intersectional feminism and urbanism. |
| Professor Renata Tyszczuk | Culture and climate change, climate scenarios, urban futures, architecture, narrative and experimental practice |
| Dr Jim Uttley | Behaviour in the built environment; Light and lighting; Active travel within the built environment; Road safety; Behavioural research methods; Visual behaviour within the built environment |
| Dr Tsung-Hsien Wang | Performance-driven design process, geometry construction and optimisation, cloud-based computing for interactive/real-time building information modelling and visualisation, information interoperation for building performance simulation and sustainability evaluation. |
| Dr Parag Wate | Procedural Building and Urban scale modelling; Building and Urban Energy Simulation; Parametric programming and computation for Simulation; Data-driven methods for Sustainable Built Environment; Uncertainty Quantification in Building and Urban performance prediction. |