Dr. Adam Rysanekis an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, an affiliate faculty member in UBC’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Director of the UBC Master’s of Engineering Leadership in High Performance Buildings. As an architectural scientist, Dr. Rysanek contributes teaching & research at the inflection point between the fundamental sciences and the practices of building design, construction, and operation. In 2018, he founded the Building Decisions Research Group (BDRG) at UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability.
As an interdisciplinary team, the BDRG explores many research themes but principally pursues advances in three areas: 1) building design and construction through new applications of simulation, machine learning, and uncertainty quantification; 2) the holistic assessment of occupant health and well-being in buildings; and 3) applied technologies for future low-carbon and climate-resilient buildings. This work has been pursued through both traditional scholarship and large-scale research demonstration projects in the so-called ‘real world’. Dr. Rysanek was the instigator and lead researcher of EVOLVE, which in 2021 became one of Canada’s largest Passive House-certified multi-family residential buildings. Between 2021 and 2023, he was the faculty lead of the Third Space, an award-winning building demonstration project with near-zero embodied carbon, developed by students of UBC’s Third Quadrant Design team. He was also previously co-lead of a collaboration with Princeton University, ETH Zurich, and UC Berkeley on the design and construction of a novel outdoor radiant cooling system in Singapore.
Dr. Rysanek’s work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Scientific Reports, Applied Energy, and Building & Environment. He received the 2017 Best Paper Award from Building & Environment, and his parallel research on novel approaches to building cooling led to a successful U.S. patent in 2022. He has been an active public voice on built-environment policy related to climate change, occupant health and well-being, and building performance—co-authoring op-eds in Scientific American and The Globe and Mail, and contributing an invited commentary to Buildings & Cities on rethinking indoor environmental quality standards for a warming, post-COVID world. His work has drawn extensive national and international media attention, with coverage in The Washington Post, Reuters, CBC, CTV, and Global News, among others.
Dr. Rysanek holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and a BASc and MSc from Queen’s University at Kingston. His PhD dissertation introduced new techniques for incorporating technical and economic uncertainty into the forecasting of low-carbon building design decisions. Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Rysanek held research appointments at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Technology in Architecture, the ETH Zurich Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, and the Energy Efficient Cities Initiative at the University of Cambridge.