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.

Group of PhD students and staff at social event

Supervisors and research topics

Supervisor	Research interests
Dr Emma Cheatle	Critical-creative spatial theory and ficto-critical writing; Feminist and de-colonial theory, practice and pedagogy; Urban common land; Health and maternity architecture; Modernist art and architecture; Interdisciplinary topics between art architecture and literature
Dr Wen-Shao Chang	Timber Engineering, Bamboo Engineering, Structural Materials, Building Conservation, Earthquake Engineering, Structural Control
Professor Steve Fotios	Research in lighting for pedestrians, drivers and cyclists; research methods for visual psychophysics.
Professor Karim Hadjri	Inclusive/age-friendly design; Ageing-in-place: accessible design; Design for health and wellbeing; Design of dementia-friendly environments; Design of enabling environments.
Dr Irit Katz	Spaces of displacement, migration and refuge; Urban spaces of ethnic and cultural diversity, exclusion and inequality; Camps (refugee camps, migrant camps, resettlement camps, protest camps, detention camps, etc.); Transnational and urban borderscapes; Spaces of conflict and violence; Housing, including rights and evictions, emergency shelters and diaspora homes; The relations between politics, aesthetics, and poetics; Critical spatial practice; Critical theories, including urban critical theories, feminist theories, post/decolonial theories and political philosophy
Dr Florian Kossak	Urban history, contemporary urbanism, urban design, experimental mediation of architecture.
Dr Ranald Lawrence	Environmental design, history of environment, urban history, architectural regionalism, building performance evaluation, occupant behaviour, adaptive comfort theory.
Dr Jo Lintonbon	Urban history and theory of the 19th and 20th centuries, building conservation and conservation led urban regeneration, design approaches within the historic built environment.
Dr Krzysztof Nawratek	Post-capitalist city (crisis of neoliberal city model), Post-secular urban theory (city and religions), Urban Re-industrialisation
Dr Chengzhi Peng	Morphological descriptors/predictors in urban microclimate simulation of neighbourhood planning and building design; Modelling environmental stress vulnerability of a city’s building stocks (e.g., dwelling, cultural heritage, healthcare, industrial etc.) in future climate to inform sustainable stock management
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 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
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 Sally Shahzad	Personal Comfort Systems (PCS); Thermal comfort; Environmental control; User behaviour; Energy efficiency; Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE); Healthy buildings; Ventilation strategies; Sustainable architecture; Low carbon design.
Professor Fionn Stevenson	Sustainable design, building performance evaluation, housing occupancy feedback, occupant behaviour, bioregionality, ecological construction materials and products, design for usability, deconstruction and re-use.
Professor Renata Tyszczuk	The contemporary city, experimental practice, reframing sustainability.
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.