One year, counting up...

It's been exactly one year since I moved to Philadelphia and the transition has gone very well. My grants have all been transferred and I am growing my small research group. I spent the better part of the last year talking to different people and getting to know folks in different departments and universities, as well as the City of Philadelphia. I'm very happy that I have made strong connections with faculty and researchers in public health, computer science, transportation modeling, and energy systems from Drexel and beyond. I also had the pleasure of talking about my research at a number of different venues (University of Hartford, Delaware, UCCRN, and at the Iceland School of Energy-- the photo is from a geothermal spring near Reykjavik).

I now have one new Ph.D. student, Hamed Yassaghi, who joined us from Sharif University in Iran where he received a Masters degree in Energy Engineering. Hamed is working on climate change and its impacts on building performance modeling. He is interested in developing new ways to manage and adjust weather files to predict how buildings will behave as our climate continues to change.

In the fall, we welcome a second new Ph.D. student Shideh Amiri, who received two Masters degrees from Penn State and Texas A&M respectively. She will work with our collaborator, Dr. Rusty Lee at the University of Delaware on developing the Transportation module for the IUMAT project.

Nariman Mostafavi, my post-doctoral fellow, who came here from UMass with me will continue his second year working on IUMAT. He produced two papers in his first year as a post-doc on water-use in buildings from an urban metabolism framework. In the fall, he teaches a course for Drexel graduates and upper level undergraduates that focuses on Urban Resilience.

Lastly, I am honored to be part of an Erasmus global classroom at Lecco, Italy in collaboration with the Politechnical Institute of Milan. The course is called Responsive Facades and is co-taught by Dr. Eugenia Ellis and Dr. Guilianna Iannaccone.