Human, Cities, Nature: Zen and Engineering Nexus

This event will take place in-person at 1:30 PM ET at HouseZero, 20 Sumner Road. This event is open to Harvard affiliates only.

Modern cities face a significant disconnect: buildings are often designed and operated as static entities, isolated from human life and nature. Inspired by Zen philosophy, this talk reimagines buildings as living interfaces where human comfort, urban metabolism, and ecological cycles intersect. People currently spend over 90% of their time in buildings, which account for more than 70% of overall U.S. electricity usage. Therefore, occupant behavior plays a major role in shaping energy use in buildings and cities. Future smart cities—featuring connected buildings, expanded use of distributed energy resources, and widespread electric vehicle adoption—need an occupant-centered approach. This approach enables optimal and distributed coordination of building clusters and DERs with the smart grid, while considering human behavior and mobility. This talk will explore how Zen philosophy is applied to studying occupant behavior, integrating buildings with the grid across urban scales, exploring bio-inspired building insulation materials, and understanding behavior-driven impacts on building operations, all of which foster an occupant-centric ecosystem for future smart cities.

SPEAKER: BING DONG, PHD

Dr. Bing Dong is a Traugott Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Syracuse University. He also serves as the Co-Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems. Dr. Dong’s research interests span the broad area of smart buildings and cities, including energy efficiency, occupant behavior modeling at both building and urban scales, buildings-to-grid integration, building controls and diagnostics, and AI/ML applications for future smart buildings. He served as the Subtask leader for IEA EBC Annex 79 and Annex 66, collaborating with 100 researchers from 16 countries. Dr. Dong has led 35 research projects that have resulted in research awards totaling over $20 million, funded by the NSF, the Department of Energy (DOE), ARPA-E, NYSERDA, Honeywell, Carrier, and other industry partners. He has published more than 130 journal and conference papers and holds a dozen patents. Dr. Dong is the recipient of the 2018 IBPSA-USA Emerging Contributor Award, the 2019 NSF CAREER Award, and several best paper awards. He is the Associate Editor of the International Journal of Building Simulation and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Building and Environment. He also serves as the Vice Chair for ASHRAE TC 7.10, as well as on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Building Physics (2021-2025). Dr. Dong received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.