Dr. Miguel Martin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
M.Martin@tudelft.nl

I have more than 10 years of experience in the field of urban climate and building energy efficiency. I have essentially studied interactions between buildings and their outdoor environment using both experimental and modelling approaches. I have conducted various field experiments in the outdoor built environment using automatic weather stations, meteorological flux towers, and infrared thermal cameras. Data I have collected through fields experiments have been used to either validate physically-based models or train data-driven models. Using the models, I have performed various analysis at the building and neighbourhood scale to predict the impact of urban heat islands on building energy consumption and to evaluate various countermeasures. The main objective of the analysis has been to show architects how to make buildings more energy effective and urban planners how to make cities more environmentally sustainable.

I received my Bachelor and Master degree in Computer Science at the University of Geneve (Switzerland). At the end of my Master, I wrote a thesis about humain-machine interactions using brain waves.

As a first professional experience in research, I worked at the Energy Center of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. I was hired in a project to study energy flows in Switzerland. The project enabled me to realize the importance of buildings in the total consumption of energy within a country. I could also see how computer science and information technologies can help in the development of smarter and more sustainable cities.

The knowledge I acquired at the Energy Center motivated my decision to work as a research engineer at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). My research was first sponsored by the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi and then by the MIT & MI cooperative program to investigate on co-simulation techniques using physically-based urban canopy and building energy models.

After that, I moved to Singapore to purse my career in academia at National University of Singapore .

• I was first hired as a research fellow to work on urban microclimate modelling under the sponsorship of the Energy & Environmental Sustainable Solutions research program.
• I was then granted the NUS Research Scholarship and the President’s Graduate Fellowship to do a Ph.D. in the department of Building Science. During my Ph.D., I further studied physically-based methods to simulate interactions between buildings and their outdoor environment. The main innovation of my Ph.D. work was to use computational fluid dynamics to perform simulations of the outdoor built environment. From the simulations, it was possible to improve the spatial resolution with which the impact of anthropogenic heat releases and countermeasures to urban heat islands on the outdoor temperature can be observed at the building scale. To validate estimates of outdoor conditions obtained by computational fluid dynamics, I conducted a field experiment in the university campus of the National University Singapore under the support of the University Campus Infrastructure and the Office of Deputy President. Results of my Ph.D. study were exploited in Virtual Singapore, a research program sponsored by the National Research Foundation, the Singapore Land Authority, and the Government Technology Agency.
• At the end of my Ph.D., and after, I worked as a senior research fellow at the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore. My research focused on observations of the outdoor built environment using infrared thermography.

Apart from research, I have practiced martial arts for several years. Since I traveled to Iceland, I have interests in hiking. I am very proud to be the father of a lovely little girl.