Resource & Energy Efficiency Lab

Rahman Azari

Lab Director, razari@psu.edu

Rahman Azari, Ph.D., is an architect, associate professor of architecture, and director of RE2 Lab at the Pennsylvania State University. Azari is also affiliated with the Penn State Department of Architectural Engineering, Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE), Stuckeman Center for Design Computation (SCDC), and Hamer Center for Community Design. Azari’s research on carbon-neutral buildings and cities has been supported by research grants from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), US Department of Energy (DOE), and Penn State IEE, SCDC, and LiMC2. His publications includes edited books, book contributions, conference papers, and articles in journals such as Nature Communications, Energy and Buildings, Building and Environment, Journal of Building Engineering, and Journal of Management in Engineering. In 2019, Azari was recognized as a ‘Researcher to Know’ by the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition. 

Azari is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Architectural Engineering and serves on the advisory boards of Global Building Network and Hamer Center for Community Design. He has also served as guest-editor for the journals of Buildings, and Energy and Buildings. Azari has served as faculty advisor to winning entries for the US DOE Solar Decathlon Design Challenge (2022) and Build Challenge (2023), and AIA+ACSA COTE Top Ten competitions (2016, 2017). 

Prior to Penn State, Azari served as an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Texas San Antonio. With a background in architecture, Azari holds a Ph.D. in Built Environment (Sustainability track) from the University of Washington in Seattle (2013). Azari is a Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC).

Affiliate Faculty and Collaborators

Mehrdad Mahdavi

Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, Penn State 

Profile and resume

Mohammadjavad Mahdavinejad

Humboldtian Fellow, Department of Building Systems and Building Technology, RPTU Kaiserslautern, Germany; Professor of Architecture, University of Nizwa, Oman; Professor of Architecture, Tarbiat Modarres University, Iran

Postdoctoral Scholars

Sepideh Korsavi

Status: Post-doctoral Researcher, Pennsylvania State University
Email: ssk5573@psu.edu

Sepideh Korsavi, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher within the Department of Architecture, at the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to Penn State, Sepideh served as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Building Engineering and a researcher in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at University of Plymouth, UK. Sepideh’s research uses experimental and simulation-based methods to study different aspects of Indoor Environmental Quality, occupants’ health and physiological variables, and energy consumption in buildings. 

Sepideh was awarded a Ph.D. degree from the Built and Natural Environment Department, Coventry University, UK, in 2020. Her Ph.D. project studied the integrated aspects of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) including thermal comfort, visual comfort and indoor air quality, alongside occupants’ adaptive behaviours in schools to provide more comfortable environments for the school occupants and suggested policy changes regarding the design of schools. Sepideh received ‘The Lanchester Trust Student Prize 2020’ for demonstrating Enterprise, Initiative, Creativity, and Invention in her PhD thesis. 

DOCTORAL STUDENTS

Jingshi Zhang

Status: Ph.D. Student, Pennsylvania State University
Email: jfz5431@psu.edu

Ph.D. Topic: Electrochemical Energy Harvesting through Building Skin Integration
Committee: Rahman Azari (Chair, co-advisor), Ute Poerschke (co-advisor), Julian Wang, Derek Hall

Jingshi Zhang, originally from China, is an architectural designer. Prior to joining Penn State in 2021 as a doctoral student, she completed the Built Ecologies Master of Science program at Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute (RPI). She has also completed a Master of Architecture program at Syracuse University. Jingshi’s research interests include advanced building envelopes, building performance simulation, sustainable design, and energy-saving strategies. Jingshi’s research at CASE, RPI, focused on algae bio-reactor building envelopes where she used algae’s extraordinary properties to establish a connection between environmental information and building appearance while capturing CO2, generating electricity, storing heat, and providing shading for indoor environments.

Zia Mohajerzadeh

Status: Ph.D. Student, Pennsylvania State University
Email: zjm5337@psu.edu

Ph.D. Topic: Phase Change Material Performance Optimization for Building Skins 
Committee: Rahman Azari (Chair, advisor), Ute Poerschke, Julian Wang

Being originally from Iran, Zia Mohajerzadeh received his first master’s degree from the Iran University of Science and Technology(IUST), followed by a Master of Science in Architecture from the University of Oregon where his thesis focused on the impact of dynamic facades on environmental issues such as indoor air quality, natural ventilation, and energy consumption in office buildings. Zia’s research interests lie with sustainable design, advanced building envelopes, high-performance buildings, and energy-efficiency in buildings.

Zia is currently a doctoral student at Penn State since Fall 2022 and his doctoral research focuses on the optimization of dynamic facade operations based on the occupant and environmental data.

Hanin Othman 

Status: Ph.D. Student, Pennsylvania State University
Email: hao5085@psu.edu

Ph.D. Topic: Robotic Internet of Things-based Sensing of  Indoor Air Quality
Committee: Rahman Azari (Chair, advisor), Jose Duarte, Benay Gürsoy Toykoç

Hanin Othman, originally from Jordan, is an architectural designer and a doctoral researcher at Penn State since Fall 2022. Prior to joining Penn State as a Ph.D. student, she completed her M.SC. degree in Architectural Engineering at the University of Jordan and worked as Teaching Assistant and design studio supervisor at the Hashemite University. Hanin’s research interests include advanced sustainable building technologies, built environment quality, energy efficiency, machine learning and smart systems. Hanin’s doctoral research will explore the application of a real-time monitoring systems to achieve optimal indoor environmental quality and uses data science and digital technology to draw attention to smart buildings as potential means of providing correlations between users and building systems to improve energy efficiency and comfort.

Elnaz Ghasemi 

Status: Ph.D. Student, Pennsylvania State University
Email: elnazghasemi@psu.edu

With a Master’s degree in Architecture from Tarbiat Modares University in Iran, Elnaz Ghasemi joined Penn State initially as a Ph.D. student in Architectural Engineering (2022-2023). Elnaz joined RE2 Lab in Fall 2023 and is currently a Ph.D. student in Architecture interested in energy use and carbon emissions of built environments. Elnaz is a recipient of multiple awards including a German Government travel scholarship awarded during her Master’s studies and the James E. Marley’s graduate fellowship in engineering in Summer 2023.

MASTER OF SCIENCE STUDENTS

Arjun K Janardhanan 

Status: MS Student, Pennsylvania State University
Email: ajk7152@psu.edu 

Arjun K Janardhanan is an Architect with two years of professional experience working with various typologies in India and UAE. He graduated from the National Institute of Technology in Calicut, India. While working at Serie Architect, an award-winning studio in Mumbai, he was part of a team that was in charge of masterplanning and designing spaces for the Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Dharampur, India. The project recently won the Architectural Review Cultural Regeneration Award 2022. Arjun’s interests are in Sustainability, Energy Efficient Design, Evolution of Technology and its effects on Architecture, and Computational Design. His Undergraduate Thesis explored the evolution of Architecture School Typology guided by the techno-socio-cultural forces and its contextual adaptation.

FORMER GRADUATE STUDENTS

Liwen Kang

Current Position: Ph.D. Student, Illinois Institute of Technology