team

Prof. Marilyne Andersen

Supervisor at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

Country of residence
Switzerland

Marilyne Andersen is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Head of the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID). Her research focuses on the impact of daylight on building occupants around questions of comfort, perception and health within an architectural design context, thereby reaching out to other fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. 

With a background in physics, she was a tenure-track professor at MIT from 2004 to 2010, was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL from 2013 to 2018, is Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab and co-founder of the consulting startup OCULIGHT dynamics, offering specialized consulting services on the psycho-physiological effects of light in design.Author of over 200 refereed scientific papers with several distinctions, she was the inaugural laureate of the Daylight Research Award in 2016 and led the winning team for the US Solar Decathlon 2017 competition. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Building & Environment, LEUKOS and Buildings & Cities journals.

Role in the project

Research conducted at LIPID will aim to determine how lighting conditions found in the built environment influence the neurophysiological behavior of its occupants, with a dedicated focus on daylighting aspects. We will put a special emphasis on alertness and circadian phase synchronization, and will explore how these co-called non-visual responses to light (attention and cognition, alertness, phase-shifting effects) complement visual comfort requirements. Their interactions will be examined both through user experiments – mostly in real-life conditions and involving wearable technology – and through computational modelling, in order to better define what criteria a “healthy (indoor) lighting” should fulfill.

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