Best Paper Award: Aliakbar Kamari
Postdoc and architectural engineer Aliakbar Kamari recently won the Best Paper Award for his research in developing a sustainability-focused tool for rapidly generating and evaluating holistic renovation scenarios.
Congratulations to 32-year-old Postdoc Aliakbar Kamari, who won the Best Paper Award for his research in architectural engineering at the international Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) Conference 2019 in Tokyo.
Aliakbar won the prize for his paper “Development of a rating scale to measuring the KPI’s in the generation and evaluation of holistic renovation scenarios” – the culmination of three years’ work toward the development of a sustainability-focused tool for building renovations.
The tool, called PARDIS (process integrating renovation decision support), is intended to identify, rate and evaluate several measurable (or quantitative) sustainability goals (e.g. energy efficiency, life-cycle cost, indoor climate, environmental impacts, spatial quality etc.) very early in the design phase, tailored for renovation of dwellings in the Danish context.
“If we want a truly sustainable built environment, we need to look at the bigger picture. We cannot focus on energy renovation alone. Existing buildings can benefit from adopting a broader approach to sustainability, which e.g. seeks to decrease operation and maintenance costs and increase the building’s adaptability, durability, and resilience towards future challenges,” says Aliakbar Kamari, who has spent the last three years building the tool.
He’s expecting to release the first version of the tool in about 1-2 months. So, stay alert for updates.
After his bachelor in architectural engineering from the IAU University of Hamedan in Iran Aliakbar Kamari went to Australia where he began his master’s degree in civil engineering. He graduated from Pune University in India and after a few years as an instructor at the Tehran Institute of Technology, he went to Italy to the University of Palermo to begin his PhD.
“Europe is the place to go when researching in architecture. Especially countries like Italy and Denmark. So many great achievements have taken place here. It is a fantastic opportunity to be a part of if you want to positively impact on your world and society with scientific research.”
Today Aliakbar Kamari holds a Double Degree PhD in which he was awarded one PhD diploma from the department of architecture, University of Palermo, and another from the department of engineering, Aarhus University.
He is part of the research team Tectonic Design at the Department of Engineering, Aarhus University, which is focused on bringing further integration into the design process bridging engineering topics to architecture and vice versa for achieving Tectonic building designs.
Team leader is Professor Poul Henning Kirkegaard.