Yufan Zhang

Biography

Dr Yufan Zhang is an architect. She carried out her PhD in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. Her PhD work was focused on occupants’ comfort and behaviour and how they use environmental control strategies to modify their internal environment. In January 2008, she joined Salford University as a Research Fellow, conducting research on a variety of issues related to ‘realising value in use’ of the built environment. This involves the identification of international good practice, linking this to evidence from applied activities in order to develop a stronger evidence base to better understand the characteristics of beneficial spaces for users, especially in the design and refurbishment of schools. In July 2015, she started her work as a senior research fellow in IDL. Her main research area focused on a holistic view identifying healthcare building and space characteristics that relate to the occupants’ health outcome and well beings.

Research Interest

My research area from the design point of view is to take a multi-dimensional, holistic analysis of the built environment (BE) within which humans live and sought to discover and explain the impacts on human well-being and performance; from the end-user point of view, I look at the design strategies with an intention not only to maximize the occupants’ benefits but also to minimize the buildings’ energy consumption, that is, despite the well intention of designers, how the end users actually perceive the building, how users really use it accordingly, and how the building performs in real usage etc. The latest project HEAD (Holistic Evidence and Design, EPSRC funded) focused on the school and classroom environmental design and its impact on pupils' learning progress. The findings of all projects have been published in many peer reviewed academic journals. One of them turned out to be the most downloaded article in Journal 'Building and Environment' and won the 'Best Paper Award' in 2013.